What image comes to mind when you think of the 2002 Winter Games?
If you answered huge crowds and traffic jams, you can probably forget about bidding on the latest contract to be issued by the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee.Organizers are looking for an advertising agency that can come up with a unique image for Utah's Olympics, including a mascot that will make its debut at the close of the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan.
And while the mascot may end up being the most recognized symbol of the 2002 Winter Games, there's plenty of other image-builders to be designed. The long list includes an emblem, sport pictograms, signs and even typography.
A 20-page description of the job was mailed out last week to 38 advertising agencies. Nineteen of the agencies are in Utah, and all but eight of the rest are in Atlanta, site of the 1996 Summer Games. (See accompanying story.)
There's no amount specified for the image program in the organizing committee's current $800 million budget, although $6.5 million is set aside for advertising and promotion.
The total cost of the image contract could be more, since nearly every area of the budget includes money for signs, uniforms, stationery and other image-related items.
"We're `branding' the organizing committee with a look, and we're trying to do it in a cohesive way," said Dave Johnson, the committee's vice president for Games. "We're creating a corporate identity."
And an identity for Salt Lake City. The advertising agency chosen has to involve the community "in conceptualizing the central theme of the Games, thus highlighting the community's distinctive features and culture."
Johnson said that could include polls to find out how most Utahns want the state portrayed. Nothing has been decided. "Mountain or alpine? Desert or western? High tech? There's no agenda," he said.
Bids are due to the Olympic offices by April 25, and the committee's board of trustees is tentatively scheduled to choose from among the finalists at a meeting in June.
The public will get its first look at the Winter Games' new image by June 1997, when the new emblem is scheduled to be introduced. The mascot comes next, in February 1998, then the sport pictograms in 1999.
Salt Lake City's original Games logo was a graphic representation of the mountains and downtown skyscrapers. The current logo incorporates the graphic into a snowflake shape.
Neither the bid nor the organizing committee has had a mascot. Atlanta chose one of the most controversial mascots in memory, a big, blue, bug-eyed computer-generated creature named Izzy to represent the 1996 Summer Games.
Nagano, however, selected a more traditional mascot. The Snowlets are a quartet of owls that emphasize the 1998 Winter Games' focus on the natural beauty of the Japanese Alps.