Charities - as well as sports and cultural events throughout Britain - are bracing themselves for a cash drought over the next six years, as major corporate players direct their cash towards the London Olympics organising committee's £750 million sponsorship target.
One worried event director told Times Online: "There's little doubt that events like ours are very concerned that, with the London Olympics having such obvious clout for promotional purposes, they can go around and hoover up the lion's share of sponsorship budgets from major, blue-chip companies over the next few years.
"We could be facing a situation whereby we are left to fight for the sponsorship crumbs from the Olympic table."
Sir Keith Mills, the deputy chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG), unveiled his organisation's marketing strategy last week.
LOCOG is looking to sign ten top tier companies for at least £50 million each, in cash or kind, in return for being associated with the London Games over the next six years.
In common with the International Olympic Committee and the practice of every Games, summer and winter, back to 1984, London will offer exclusive rights to companies in a variety of commercial sectors (LOCOG has identified ten), such as cars, telecoms, banking and utilities.
Companies with existing close associations, such as London bid supporters BT, Barclays and British Airways, are widely expected to continue to back the 2012 Games.
But London does not have a clear run at approaching the cream of the world's corporations. The 2012 organisers are prohibited from offering deals to any existing IOC partners such as McDonalds, Visa, Samsung and Panasonic, or (and this is where LOCOG's task becomes tricky) their direct rivals. Thus, for example, London will be unable to sign Burger King as its official fast food restaurant of the 2012 Games or Mastercard as its credit card.
Of London's £2 billion budget, 35 per cent must be raised from sponsorship. The remainder will come from the IOC, television revenue and ticket sales.
London has split its sponsorship packages into three tiers: the top tier of ten companies; then a second tier that could have up to 30 "supporters"; and a third tier of many as 50 associated companies. Sir Keith said that LOCOG hopes to announce the identity of the first two top-tier sponsors by the end of this year.
The announcement has sent shudders down the spines of marketing and finance directors of British events which have not, as yet, managed to secure longer term sponsorship deals of their own through to 2012.
The director of a sponsorship agency that handles a range of sports and cultural events, many of them staged in the capital or south-east England, spoke of his organisation's fears. "Companies' marketing budgets have been very tight for a number of years now," he told Times Online on the condition of anonymity.
"You have got to assume that if London 2012 signs up 100 companies for the next five or six years, the bulk of their sponsorship and marketing spend is going to go on the Olympics. If you top-cut the country's top 100 firms out of the sponsorship equation, it is going to make our job exceptionally difficult."
The sports event director, who also asked not to be named, said: "We have been fortunate in having a very strong and loyal sponsor closely associated with our event for a number of years.
"But if they opt not to renew in a couple of years' time, when our existing agreement expires, we have genuine fears that London may have already tied up any likely replacements. Seven-figure sponsorship deals were few and far between as it was."
But the sponsorship agency director did suggest that there may be some hope for sponsor-seeking events. "It has always been one of the challenges of our job, and I suppose we will just have to think a little bit laterally.
"There are a lot of new companies, some really successful, who could be looking for the right sort of exposure. So let's say that Google, for one example, as Nike did in the 1990s, decides that it does not need to be directly associated with the Olympics, whether at IOC or London level.
"It could be that one of its rivals decides that their brand needs a positive marketing push: the £10 million a year that London is asking is a huge wodge of cash out of any firm's marketing budget. But there will be plenty of events which could offer strong packages for a fraction of that."
The director also questioned how effective London's packages would be for companies outside the top tier. "'Associated with'? 'A London 2012 supporter'? How effective will those lesser packages actually be? Some of the companies which sign up to the lesser packages might find themselves a little swamped."
He highlighted former NBA star Dennis Rodman's recent appearances on Channel 4's Celebrity Big Brother series, during which the American wore a baseball cap with a clearly identifiable GoldenPalace.com logo, despite some judicious use of gaffer tape by the show's producers.
"During the Athens Games, one character pulled a stunt by jumping off the Olympic diving board wearing nothing but a tutu, a smile, and Golden Palace's web address scrawled across his chest," he said.
"He got a €300 fine and spent the night in jail, but the traffic to Golden Palace's website soared 53 per cent, while official Olympic sponsors like Visa, who paid the IOC $40 million, saw their number of web visitors decline during the Games.
"It just shows that it doesn't matter how much cash you spend as a sponsor, a bit of imagination can go a long way further."
