"Go Red for China!" was the slogan unveiled on the Chinese mainland
by Pepsi-Cola, whose ubiquitous blue can will, "for a limited time,"
be red. Pepsi is just one of many companies advertising at the
Olympics, at a cost of up to $6 billion, in an attempt to tap a
largely untouched market of more than 1 billion. "You've never seen
the Olympics in a market that has such domestic commercial scale,"
Michael Wood, chief executive for greater China at advertising firm
Leo Burnett, told the New York Times. "When the Olympics were in Los
Angeles and Atlanta, the U.S. market was already fully developed."
This is the Olympics the West wanted: games where the grandest prize
is not a gold medal but a glittering entree to China's seemingly
endless army of potential consumers. This is the reason that George
W. Bush will attend the opening ceremonies, the first U.S. President
to do so on foreign soil, and that in March, mere days before the
crackdown in Tibet, Condoleezza Rice, laughably, took China off the
State Department's list of nations that abuse human rights.
<http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18345>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2008/08/chinas-olympic-trials.htm>monochrom
at 8/05/2008 05:36:00 PM
