LOGO

The Olympics are one of the biggest events held in the world. It is a stage that athletes dream of performing on to prove their superiority in their discipline. Given the scale of this event, inevitably it won’t go by without a hitch.

During the Vancouver winter Olympics someone decided to pull prank on the media. It was a subtle, but yet a hilarious way to mess with the Vancouver 2010 brand.

Originally, the Vancover Winter Olympics were represented by three mascots; Miga, Quatchi, and Sumi. They also had a sidekick called Mukmuk. How cute are they!

But back to the prank: A Canadian artist named Michael Barrick decided to add a mascot of his own and using Photoshop, added a jolly, innocent and cuddly looking bear to the mix. There is nothing wrong with this picture – or is there?

The extra bear is in fact no ordinary bear, it’s a bear with bad intentions and his name is Pedobear! Pedobear has been an internet meme for a few years and as his name suggest, he’s not at all well intentioned.

It goes without saying that linking a brand to a naughty bear is not good for business. But thanks to Google Images, where Barrick’s version of the Olympic mascots had made it to the top five results, the Pedobear wreacked havoc on the 2010 Winter Olympics brand. All of the sudden, the new version of the Olympics mascots were appearing in media outlets all over Europe.

There is no full-proof way to make sure a brand is represented correctly by the media, but it can help to make the correct marketing material accessible to everyone who might have to use your brand for whatever purposes.

At Brand Regard we encourage our clients to use the Brand Regard API to share make branding material easily accessible to the whoever needs it. An example is our own press kit page, which uses our WordPress plugin to make both the Brand Regard logo and screen shots of the application available to those who need it. Whenever we update a file in Brand Regard, this update is reflected on the PR kit page.

It might not prevent Google Images from associating our brand with unsavoury characters, but at least it does help journalists use the right images for our brand rather than those found via a random Google search.