European Olympic Games: tell a brilliant story globally

By AzerNews

The Azerbaijani capital Baku will have the honor to host the first European Olympic Games in 2015. The first-ever event of this kind will be in focus of the world, which has recently seen off the fantastic London Olympic Games -- truely magnificient and extremely attractive.

Greg Nugent, Marketing Director for the London Olympic Games Organizing Committee (LOGOC), shared with Azernews the key milestones in making the London Games really popular and his visions of making the European Olympic Games in Baku remarkable.

"Global message of Baku is now that Azerbaijan is proud to host the next important big event," Nugent says.

According to Nugent, the most important issue is to do a brilliant job, to plan not just domestically, but globally.

"When you really capture the mood, tell a brilliant story globally, turn it into global messaging. Make sure that the athletes will be happy, grand masters will be happy and those who come to see their performances will be happy here," he added.

"I have a real confidence that your buildings are the real momentum for Baku, Azerbaijan, and people around the world will notice this," he noted. "In Baku, you can see the real sense of that the city is taking the major events seriously, which is really exciting."

The main thing here is to create and tell a story across Baku, across Azerbaijan, make sure that "everyone sees it, everyone feels something personal about the Games", Nugent said.

Looking back at his London Olympics experience, Nugent stressed that the most important thing that the LOGOC focused on was making sure that as many people as possible across the country had a real sense that they are part of the project.

"We, the Organizing Committee, had had to push the limits," he says. "Because London had to be the best and we had to show the world that we are brilliant in doing this."

"We built ideas that could let us do everything ranging from running with the torch, or becoming a leader, or being a volunteer or having a party. The game makers were brilliant, our volunteers were fantastic, we all worked hand in hand. We have collectively built it. We just built lots and lots of ideas, and the strategy was very simple, as we needed 60 million people of supporters."

"We wanted millions and millions of people across the UK to feel that they are part of the project. So the strategy was to bring everybody as close to the project as possible and make them feel that they are part of it.

"In the center of the key opinion indicator was that we were not happy with the ticket sales measurement. We wanted to sell the tickets, which we did. When everything is done, you need to look at the distributor," he noted.

Nugent emphasized the importance of sharing the risks.

"We always made sure that we shared some of the risks. Each director had serious risks and we had serious mitigations -- kind of what we should do so that these risks would not materialize.

"In the final year we had a single idea, we did not have any single new idea, we just followed the program that we will implement," Nugent said.

Promotion of Olympic Games

Obviously, the distribution of your product is extraordinarily important in terms of making sure that people know what is happening, Nugent said.

In this regard, he believes that broadcasting and broadcast rights are very important in the promotion of the Games worldwide.

"But social media is also of crucial importance here, as well as traditional advertising. You need to boost it if you need promotion. The breakthrough in London was telling the story directly to the British public. In London we had millions and millions of individual records and there were people that wanted to buy tickets, to run with the torch or be a volunteer, and we used that."

There are things that I would really want to change in London. One is to begin journey planning earlier, probably about a year earlier.

"But in the end it did not matter, as we were so good and connected the people. We could have done it a year earlier, but in truth we could boost it at the right time."

"The greatest thing about the Olympic and Paralympic Games is the movements, NOCs, the fact that they change every time. The most exciting thing is looking at the area -- they will have different views and ideas, and that is what excites me in Olympic Movements," he emphasized.