Breakdown of an Ill-Timed Olympic Content Dump
Last week the millionaires and billionaires at the LA 2028 Olympic Organizing Committee unveiled a long-hyped brand roll out on their website, across their digital properties, and even with a few in-person advertisements splashed on walls in affluent neighborhoods. The launch comprised of twenty-six Instagram influencers and athletes being assembled by agency types to promote some truly uninspiring #content and merch. Despite some astroturfed boosting and plenty of ad buys, the launch fell flat for a variety of reasons, perhaps the most important being that there isn’t strong support for these Olympics, despite booster-added polling. The entire premise of the launch hangs on the concept that there is no single logo or brand identity for this project, which is an odd and unexpected choice, considering that Olympics have historically been branded around the aesthetic principles of fascism and nationalism, organized by discipline and unity. The other core component of the #LA28 brand is that it is vaguely political without actually confronting politics — which we did expect — and this attempt at co-opting movement work is a critical mistake on the brand’s side.
Since this launch, we’ve talked to many people who’ve worked on this campaign, from agencies who turned down this project to the #LA28 brand influencers themselves. Here’s our analysis of why it’s not only a doomed campaign but ultimately how this campaign will actively work against LA28’s own goals and provide us more leverage as our momentum grows.
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For starters: this is all old content that was scheduled for release in March – pre-COVID and pre-protests for Black lives. The LA28 media team has been working on this for over a year. It’s difficult to imagine how many people working on this content for over a year could have come up with something less inspiring. In the parlance of vapid brandspeak: it’s bad, fam.
We know that several high profile agencies passed on this campaign, and whichever mercenary shop ended up taking on the project managed to get as much wrong in the execution as one could imagine. It’s so aesthetically and conceptually challenged that it veers on farce.
One of the glaring flaws of the roll-out is not just the content but, also, the timing. Why did they think it was wise to launch last week? Perhaps they thought enough time had passed since the initial wave of protests earlier this summer, enough people had settled down, and that people’s desire for sports would outweigh any blowback. It seems LA28 thought that if they fail to address BLM or the pandemic, people would forget those world-changing forces existed. (Or maybe the contracts were expiring and they had to publish or eat the cost?) It could also have something to do with the recent press conference held by IOC chief Thomas Bach. The IOC is reportedly very sensitive to dips in public support from host city residents, so a Potemkin Village-style display of enthusiasm could be LA28’s attempt to hide Angelenos’ growing anger at the prospect of the Games.
The campaign launch was preceded by a week-long series of black and white videos, an attempt to appropriate the “street” identity of Los Angeles in the late nineties, the identity of those speaking directly against the LAPD and, indirectly, against the effects of the ‘84 Olympics — and it did so with a cast of Black and Brown actors, many of them kids and teens. Considering the overarching goal of LA28 — to “clean up” the streets of Los Angeles; to make them look as slick and lifeless as the new SoFi Stadium does against the working-class city of Inglewood– their choice to center the communities they’re aiming to destroy is absolutely fucking tone-deaf. These teaser videos served as an unintentional “before” of a neighborhood pre-development and did little to inspire engagement.
Then came the full launch: website, twenty-six logos, twenty-six brand ambassadors, and one atrocious hue of green.
The name was shortened from LA2028 to LA28, which might have initially had something to do with the twenty-eight characters they’d hoped would represent all the facets of LA they’re marketing. But they couldn’t even successfully recruit twenty-eight people who wanted to be formally entwined with this project, in a region of 11 million. Wonder why that is?
This non-commitment to a style is, of course, its own stylistic choice much like the Olympics purported neutrality in the face of politics is, of course, a political choice.
Of those twenty-six brand ambassadors who did decide to align with the brand, several of them have both publicly and privately expressed concerns about the IOC, LA28 and their shared vision. Many of the brand ambassadors are attached to a sport, an industry or a social justice issue: accessibility, feminism, racial justice, food justice, and so on – but what all three have to do with each other, besides representing Diversity or synergy is an open question. It’s more telling who isn’t represented here: houseless, working-class, poor, street vendors, Indigenous people… essentially all the groups who are at most risk of Olympic harm. In LA28’s vision, these people aren’t just unaccounted for; they don’t even exist.
The brand ambassadors are also all “volunteers,” which strikes us as odd given the net worth of the IOC, Casey Wasserman, and other billionaires on team #LA28. But on the other hand, the Olympics have a long history of exploiting volunteer labor (and exploiting our athletes), so this is actually on-brand.
Each brand ambassador “designed” a different “A” to create a changing logo (someone in the room pitching it surely used language like “dynamic” but there’s nothing really dynamic here at all) in the “L-A-2-8” logo. This non-commitment to a style is, of course, its own stylistic choice much like the Olympics purported neutrality in the face of politics is, of course, a political choice. There are many technical reasons to pick this apart from a design standpoint (font choice, the fact that two different typesets are used for the black characters). This is clearly a play to sell more SKUs of merchandise, by offering each item – a hat, socks, whatever – in twenty-six different design variations. But does anyone want this crap? Millions of Americans are out of work and 40 million plus are on the brink of eviction. Anecdotally, members of NOlympics have yet to see any merchandise of the old corporate identity worn by non-Olympic employees in LA. It’s unlikely we’re going to see any of these new A’s worn by regular Angelenos either.
Stylistically, one thing that surprised us was the color package. Who chose this green? This migraine-inducing shade screams artificial, simultaneously discordant with the Olympic brand writ large and like some artifact from the early 2000s. It feels very Fuck Jerry, a reference that itself already feels several years past its expiration date.
One thing that didn’t surprise us: LA28 has doubled down on their appropriation and commodification of “street” identity by partnering with various streetwear brands (the Hundreds), graf writers (Chaz Bojórquez), tattoo artists (Dr. Woo), and even street vendors (Tacos 1986). But in 2020, street culture has been upsold so much that it has come to signify rich-kids on Melrose and Fairfax wearing $119 sweatpants. This gentrified bouillabaisse of #LA28 is especially enraging because it pilfers culture from working-class, often Latinx, residents of the city — residents working to create public art in their communities — residents who, if not criminalized for their actions, end up painted over, and erased, in the process. LA28’s marketing team, when stripping away all context and history, might not realize that street art was made to be public — a practice inherently resisting consumerism, privatization, and $1800 tickets to the show. By trying to appropriate street culture, LA28 is directly provoking the streets to respond.
This cleaning-up and capitalizing off of other’s identities and cultures, off of public art and ‘outspokenness’, might be the closest thing to continuity the LA28 brand has to offer. Since last week, they’ve unveiled a small series of murals in Venice, Van Nuys, and Hollywood, three epicenters of displacement and homelessness — and areas our coalition knows well. The LA28 mural series is so far an underwhelming reboot of the LA ‘84 murals, reflecting a brain trust with no ideas except doing what worked last time. And for LA ‘84, the artistic legacy still has some positive residue, even though the City and County failed to be the stewards of any meaningful legacy after LA ‘84, as shown by what they did to this Judy Baca mural, or how real estate interests are trying to weaponize Olympic murals in Highland Park. LA28’s mural series, if they attempt to install twenty-three more of them, will be met with community pushback which is, of course, something they didn’t factor into their reboot. An open question is how LA28’s partnership with LAPD will inform their response to community pushback. In the past, LAPD has stood behind real estate interests and attempted to categorize political graffiti as “hate crimes” in gentrifying neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and Highland Park.
Murals in Los Angeles have always been political, radiating from traditions from Chicanx, Black, and Asian immigrant communities using our walls as tableaux to tell the many stories of struggle. Murals were in fact so powerful that the County outlawed them for decades, as a petty tool to try to control poor people.
It didn’t work.
In 2020 LA’s cops and City Council members have assumed the role of art “curators” responsible for deciding what’s should be seen and what’s considered vandalism, something to be arrested for. Murals, when meant to stay, can literally act as writing on the wall. They warn you: gentrification is coming.
When we interviewed Paul Prejza, the co-designer of the 1984 Olympics, he told us that those in charge of LA ‘84, “went in and they worked with the gang members to patrol the streets around Expo Park once the stuff got put up, so that nothing would get vandalized or be taken down,” that, “they literally got the kids who were on the street and made deputies out of them.”
Of course LA28, Eric Garcetti, Casey Wasserman and the entire Los Angeles police apparatus are acutely aware of how security will operate in 2028, and, just like the 1984 Olympics, the Games will be used to justify a new wave of surveillance and racial violence in communities that are already reeling.
On the day of the LA28 launch, the two men most responsible for foisting the Olympics on us, Mayor Eric Garcetti and Casey Wasserman, were completely silent on the subject. In the first week then there was zero word, zero promotion, zero acknowledgement of the launch by Garcetti or Wasserman, even though they were the main characters of LA 2028 brand identity #1. It wasn’t until a week had passed that Garcetti managed one heavily ratioed post. It’s almost as if LA28 is trying to distance themselves from their largest benefactors.
Our conversations with brand ambassadors have, however, led to Wasserman’s intervention behind the scenes. We’ve made the case that the Olympics are squarely incompatible with the Black Lives Matter movement and with the movement to defund police. The Olympics accelerate policing and surveillance and bolster the relationship between federal and local police. Everything LA28 stands for is in direct conflict with the core tenants of Black Lives Matter and the struggle for Black liberation as a whole. Wasserman and other #LA28 marketeers have tried to convince the ambassadors that “they don’t know” that the police are already plotting with DHS and LA2028. In 2019 we sat in on a meeting run by the City that detailed the Olympic “security” plan, so we know for a fact that plans exist and is being actively developed.
Of course LA28, Eric Garcetti, Casey Wasserman and the entire Los Angeles police apparatus are acutely aware of how security will operate in 2028, and, just like the 1984 Olympics, the Games will be used to justify a new wave of surveillance and racial violence in communities that are already reeling.
We know they are lying when they tell us they don’t know how security will look in 2028. We know they are lying when they tell us Los Angeles wants these Games. We know they’re lying about this being a “no build” Olympics. We know they are lying across the board. And now we can see that light bulb going off in people’s minds across the region.
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The LA28 launch was a failure on both their and our terms. But it provides us another platform from which to fight back against these sloppily thrown together campaigns that rely on celebrity over substance.
LA28 is a brand built on lies. Now is the time to foreground the truth: the communities at most risk of Olympic destruction do not want these games, just like this campaign portrays an LA where they’ve been erased wholesale. We will continue to analyze and puncture LA28’s lazy myths, even though as time goes on, the majority of the outpouring against LA28 has become fully organic, which is ironic of course because that’s the organic engagement LA28’s brand is trying to foment.
We must cancel the Olympics and continue undermining these violently disingenuous narratives. Time to pick a side. Help us make that a reality by signing up for updates on our soon-to-be-announced Town Hall or join our organizing team.
