Product Placement is a Bitch

How to piss off the Olympic 'brand police'

Re-post from Dangerous Minds:

Picture by Rob Hyde

This window display might look like it was put together by someone with severe dyslexia, but it is in fact a glorious “fuck you” to the London 2012 Olympics and their ludicrous and draconian “brand police.”

“Brand police”? What’s that? I’ll let The Independent:

Hundreds of uniformed Olympics officers will begin touring the country today enforcing sponsors’ multimillion-pound marketing deals, in a highly organised mission that contrasts with the scramble to find enough staff to secure Olympic sites.

Almost 300 enforcement officers will be seen across the country checking firms to ensure they are not staging “ambush marketing” or illegally associating themselves with the Games at the expense of official sponsors such as Adidas, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and BP. The clampdown goes on while 3,500 soldiers on leave are brought in to bail out the security firm G4S which admitted it could not supply the numbers of security staff it had promised.

...

Olympics organisers have warned businesses that during London 2012 their advertising should not include a list of banned words, including “gold”, “silver” and “bronze”, “summer”, “sponsors” and “London”, if they give the impression of a formal connection to the Olympics.

A lot of grumbling has been going on about the “brand police” and I hope we’ll see more of this as the games roll on.

Time to go?

Man, it seems like the news is just a never ending stream of reasons to leave the UK at the moment. Top of the list is the fucking Olympics (trying to turn London and the UK into a corporate-controlled nightmare), but there's also the cop who killed Ian Tomlinson walking free, plus more and more excessive control over the media. Here's a short selection of the stories I am talking about:

Tomlinson Death: PC not guilty
Nobody can tell you why you can't watch the BBC riots docu-drama
Britain flooded with 'brand police' to protect Olympic sponsors
Police deny Olympic residents access to home
£13tn hoard hidden form taxman by global elite