VIA Rail Canada is proud to show its support for athletes preparing to represent the country in Vancouver this February and March. From January 25th to March 28th up to two family members of Canadian athletes can travel in economy class to/from Vancouver for free. Those wishing to travel in sleeper touring class will receive a 75% discount off the adult regular fare. Included in the offer are parents, siblings, children, grandparents, spouse and/or partner. VIA is also offering a special fare for confirmed 2010 volunteers heading to Vancouver to welcome visitors from around the world. Read the full story

Source Link: by Jeff Lee, The Vancouver Sun

Last week I encountered three cases that show how hyper-sensitive the Vancouver Organizing Committee and its partners are to the issue of Olympic brand protection.

With 250 international journalists and media managers in town for the one-and-only World Press Briefing, Vanoc wanted to make sure that whatever message it sent out it was consistent with its message of protecting the Olympic brand.

The first one involved an evening reception for the media at the B.C. Institute of Technology’s aviation campus near YVR. The event was a closed-door affair where media were encouraged to put down their pens and leave their cameras back at the hotel for a night of contact-bonding.

The campus has a huge teaching hangar in which were several jets and aircraft, including a Boeing 737-200 passenger jet WestJet donated to BCIT in 2003. It turns out that the sensitive folks at Vanoc didn’t want WestJet’s logo to be seen by the journos – after all, Air Canada is the official Olympic sponsor. So a large BCIT banner was hastily thrown over the side of the jet that was showing through the glass doors between the reception and the hangar. It seemed a bit odd to me only because I had to wonder what the infringement was; the event wasn’t being filmed and none of these professionals would likely have made the connection – or even cared about it.

For reasons I don’t understand, the brand police didn’t cover up the other side of the jet – the side that faced a huge glass window to the front of the building where all the media walked by. I mean, I saw WestJet’s logo large as life and I didn’t need glasses.

If one issue of Olympic brand protection is to not give unintended exposure to a competitor, then the next example is a bit odd as well. Another evening reception hosted by Tourism BC and its government tourism partners took place at the Rocky Mountaineer train station off Terminal in Vancouver. But because the tourist train isn’t a sponsor – that’s Canadian Pacific territory – the invitation given to the journalists omitted any reference to the Rocky Mountaineer. It simply identified it as “Train Station” and gave the address. For a Vancouverite, I was admittedly confused: I thought it might be the Pacific Central station, which is also the bus depot. Rocky Mountaineer, by the way, isn’t in competition with CP, which is Vanoc’s rail freight forwarder.

The third example is one that has to be a joke but it shows how very, very VERY aware of branding all Vanoc employees are: a staffer attending the world press briefing and carrying a Starbucks coffee relayed how the person was stopped by a brand protection division colleague who noted that it was not a Coke product. Coca-Cola, you probably know, has the Olympic beverage sponsorship. And when the Games arrive in 2010, you won’t find a single Starbucks, Blenz, Artigiano’s or other brew house inside Olympic venues. Instead, Vanoc says Coke will provide its own coffee, marketed under the Far Coast label. Coke launched Far Coast in 2006. I haven’t as yet found any of its shops in Vancouver, although one opened in Toronto two years ago.