Olympic Marketers Seek To Soar Above Politics

Madison Avenue has some strategies to help shield Olympic marketers from the controversy swirling around China's positions on Darfur and Tibet.

The Beijing Summer Games are less than five months away, but ad executives are busy shooting the scores of commercials that will be broadcast on prime-time TV and show up in magazines and newspapers across the U.S.

Treading carefully around politics at the Olympics isn't new. The Games have long been plagued by political firestorms, whether over aboriginal rights at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney or Berlin's hosting the Games during the Nazi regime in 1936. But marketing experts say U.S. companies are likely to face increased scrutiny this year because in some parts of the world, China is a magnet for criticism over everything from its environmental record to the long-running discussion about human rights.

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