Friday night I watched the Olympic Athletes from Russia walk into the stadium in PyeongChang behind a white flag with five rings on it. No country name. No anthem queued up for the medal ceremony. A set of extremely good athletes and a piece of fabric a committee designed to mean as little as possible.
My first thought was not about doping. It was about the brand managers.
I have sat in the room where an Olympic sponsorship deck gets built, and I know what is actually in it. The athlete is on slide four. The flag is on slide one. Every Games campaign I have watched runs on the same borrowed fuel: a nation people already love, a palette they already own emotionally, and a sixteen day window where loving your own country is socially free.
Take the flag away and you find out how little of that was yours.
Sponsorship does not buy you meaning. It rents you somebody else's, and the landlord can change the terms without asking.
Watch what the American work is doing this month. Ralph Lauren put the team in heated parkas and the parka became the ad. Nike is running on Chloe Kim, seventeen years old, two runs into the halfpipe and already the most quotable person at these Games. Neither brand is selling a product benefit. They are selling proximity to a feeling that arrives on a schedule every two years, and they are paying enormous sums for a seat next to it.
That works right up until the feeling gets confiscated. The Russian skaters and skiers competing this week are not less talented than they were in Sochi. They are less useful. There is no anthem to cut to, no flag to put in the corner of the frame, no shorthand. A sponsor who built the whole idea on national identity now has an athlete and nothing to hang on them.
Take the flag away and you find out how little of that was yours.
Here is the part that gets lost. Most brands do this without an Olympics. You rent a holiday. You rent a city's reputation. You rent a founder's personality, a celebrity's taste, a cause that was popular before you arrived. None of it is wrong. It is just not owned, and the difference only shows up on the day it gets taken back.
The test I would run: strip the borrowed thing out of your next campaign and read what is left. If there is no argument underneath, you did not have a position. You had a lease.
Barnaby watched the entire opening ceremony from the arm of the couch and had opinions about none of it. Truffles left during the parade of nations. Neither of them cares which flag anyone carried, which makes them the only honest audience in the house.