Ambush marketing might be low on the list of obvious risks that businesses will consider when assessing how the 2012 Olympics will affect them but it could be just as damaging as transport disruption and network failure.
The technique is used by competitors to the official sponsors of major events to get their names in front of the crowds and television cameras. They might, for example, hire nearby buildings to display their advertising banners. Richard Tolley, a senior vice-president at the insurance brokers Marsh, says that the ploy might seem an attractive way to make money but will backfire.
The UK had to agree with the International Olympic Committee to outlaw unapproved advertising and marketing associations with the Games — so anybody displaying such advertising could be guilty of an offence.
Organisations should already be incorporating possible risks associated with London 2012 into their business continuity plans, just as they do with other potentially disruptive events, such as a flood or a flu pandemic. The Olympics will heighten certain threats, such as cybercrime, and bring with them some specific risks, such as falling foul of the tight controls on marketing.
“From our perspective a special event like the Olympics requires focus but it should not be fundamentally different from a normal business process,” says Garry Sidaway, director of security strategy at Integralis, the information security adviser. “Companies should be running through their business continuity plans, making sure that employees are aware of what they involve. Once you have plans in place, you have to test them to make sure that they work, and devising how to test them is part of the exercise.”
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Andy Ellis, senior director of information security for Akamai, whose servers handle tens of billions of web transactions a day, says planning for an outbreak of swine flu gives businesses a real opportunity to test their systems ahead of the event. Come 2012 the Games could mean limited staff presence and lots of home working on some days. “Send everyone home and see if your virtual private network (VPN) has the bandwidth to deal with them all.”
He advises businesses to give more attention to the resilience of their own networks rather than how the internet will hold up to increased demand, unless they have sites likely to experience a rush of traffic.
Tolley says preparation for the Games and the events themselves could have a number of knock-on effects on businesses outside the immediate Olympic ambit. For example, “the ultimate in disruption” would be if a major construction accident on an Olympic site or infrastructure project forced a business to relocate to maintain its operations.
Pressures on the availability of staff and services as the Olympics draws in workers, volunteers and supplies are more likely. For example, Tolley advises: “Haulage might cost more and take longer. Someone who relies on deliveries through airports and seaports should be aware that there may be delays, as the Olympics require a huge amount of equipment.”
Local authorities have a legal responsibility under the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act to provide business continuity advice, but bodies such as the City of London are still in the early days of working with businesses on the specific implications of 2012. As a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police says: “At this stage our main focus is working with local authorities to establish a partnership that will involve businesses when the time is right.”
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A great advantage with the Olympics, according to Sidaway, is that businesses in the UK can learn how other countries have managed. “It’s not as if we are going in with no historic data.”
Grant Purdy, associate director of the consultants Broadleaf Capital International, was involved in various aspects of risk management at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and ran a business in the city at that time.
“We created a business continuity plan for the occasion to optimise the way we responded to the disruption we expected.
“In fact, we found very little imposed disruption — most came from people staying at home or just taking leave. Our income was affected but not unduly.”
Cybercrime likely to be a big event
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Businesses also need to consider the magnet that Olympic-related electronic transactions will be for criminals, especially in some sectors. Transport infrastructure, sponsorship deals, hotel booking systems and ticketing could be vulnerable to cybercriminals committing direct fraud or the theft of personal details.
Hackers have also gone after certain websites to register protests or out of mischief. Last year, hackers invaded a French magazine’s site to try to influence the results of an opinion poll about the Beijing Olympics.
Janet Williams, a Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner and leader on e-crime for the Association of Chief Police Officers, cautions that the cybercrime threat is growing as a result of the Games. She told the association’s annual meeting in July that police were aware that precursor activities, such as creating companies and internet domains with fake names, were already under way.
The British Computer Society, the IT professional body, launched a cybercrime forensics specialist group in response to growth in computer crime. Denis Edgar-Nevill, its chairman, says: “As we move closer to 2012, cybercrime will become an even more important focus for the UK.”