Coca-Cola, Visa and Chevrolet are just a few of the many corporations throughout the world that have ponied up the necessary dinero to become proud sponsors of the Salt Lake 2002 Olympic Winter Games.
None of them, however, can quite match the notoriety now associated with Tico’s VeggieBurger Barn, which, on Thursday, became the first ever non-proud sponsor in the history of the Games.
“Personally, I think the Olympics are less and less about providing world-class athletes with a venue to display their skills and compete at the highest level than they are a means for already-rich businesses to attach their names to the biggest god forsaken spectacle on the planet and become richer still,” said Tico’s VeggieBurger Barn CEO Tico Torres.
“But I’m no idiot?I recognize the power an Olympic ad can carry in attracting consumers,” he added. “In that respect, I guess you could say that, while Tico’s VeggieBurger Barn is an official Olympic sponsor, it’s not necessarily a proud sponsor.”
To some, it may seem that the Salt Lake Organizing Committee would be hesitant to let the Olympics be sponsored by a company whose support of the Games is somewhat less sturdy than Bill Clinton’s devotion to monogamy when confronted with female interns, as SLOC has a history of levying fines against farmers who plough the Olympics’ five-ring logo into their corn fields without official permission and threatening lawsuits against local brewing companies that facetiously call themselves “unofficial sponsors” of the Games.
However, SLOC President Mitt Romney clarified that, so long as a corporation is willing to part with the requisite money the Olympics charges for sanctioning sponsorship advertising, it does not matter if the company in question is proud of, ambivalent toward or downright seething about the Olympics coming to Salt Lake City next month.
“Let’s face it?when it comes to money, we’re all whores, willing to do just about anything to get it,” Romney said. “Unless, of course, you’re a priest or a nun or something and you take one of them vows of poverty. I don’t think you’re gonna find any Mother Teresas in SLOC, though. We’re cool with whatever, so long as we get paid.”
Meanwhile, the non-proud addition of Tico’s VeggieBurger Barn onto the roster of official Olympic sponsors is expected to generate a wave of new applications among companies who previously believed their support of the Games was needed to capitalize on the massive advertising power it holds over television audiences worldwide.
Hundreds of other corporations are now said to be considering lending their name to a global event they disapprove of, but which will nevertheless enable them to generate far greater profit margins than would staying unaffiliated.
“Oh, I know that, in the past, we’ve been particularly histrionic in our opposition to the Olympics, hoping all those involved and associated with it would first be tortured with sticks of flaming bamboo shoved underneath their fingernails, then slowly battered to death with repeated blows from a crowbar to the head, given their insistence upon hosting that brutal and inhumane rodeo,” said Bob Sledder, a spokesman for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “But now that we don’t have to be proud sponsors, why not use the mass appeal of the Olympics to get our name and ideals out there?”
Torres advised any companies now considering making a move similar to that of his VeggieBurger Barn to hurry and sign the dotted line before the opportunity passes.
“Sure, you’re putting your name on a product that you may consider the biggest sham since that “Pearl Harbor” movie was supposed to dethrone “Gone With the Wind” as the ultimate American epic, but so what?” he said. “Since our ads started airing with that ‘Non-Proud Sponsor of the Olympic Games’ tag, we’ve sold three times the number of Tofu-and-SproutBurger combos that we usually do.”
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