Colin Grannell, executive vice president partnership marketing for Visa Europe, told insidethegames in an exclusive interview that, "I think the first activity should be ahead of Christmas.

"And the idea then is to make it continuous.

"We are not going to stop and start, stop and start.

"We are only 18 months away at that point.

"Once we start we will have to continue it almost on a daily basis."

However, Grannell, who has worked for long-time Olympics sponsor Visa for 20 years, also described Team 2012 - a ground-breaking initiative bringing together the British Olympic Association, London 2012, UK Sport and the British Paralympic Association (BPA) in an effort to plug a £50 million shortfall in funding for British athletes - as "probably the most complicated athletes programme we’ve ever done.

"It certainly feels that way if nothing else."

He continued: "It’s not the easiest thing working with a joint venture…

"I don’t think they’ve worked together before and I think we’ve gone through 12 months of understanding how we work together.

"And now we’re going to go through 18 months of delivering it."

He went on: "LOCOG has got its own Games agenda and BPA has got its own Paralympic Games agenda…

"We kind of transcend them all and ours is slightly different to theirs.

"It’s mixing all these slightly different objectives.

"They’ve got to make sure that we don’t step over the line and do things which damage other sponsors’ rights and those kinds of things.

"But at the same time, we have to make this team famous.

"My economic perspective on all of this is: this is the first time a major corporation like Visa has done this, on this scale.

"It may or may not be the blueprint for what happens in the future.

"We have to give it our very best shot to decide whether it’s the right blueprint or not because I’m expecting post-2012 that any Government funding…is being reduced.

"The sponsor route might be one of the ways in which, in future, additional funding is raised.

"So this might be the blueprint for that.

"And therefore it has to work and so even if there are, if you like, slight differences in objectives and stuff, we need to find a way of navigating through all of those to make sure we give it the best shot."

On the reasons for Visa’s participation in the programme, Grannell, who will be a panel member at next month’s Global Sports Industry Congress in London, said: "The thing that attracted us to this property was not the individual athletes at all.

"It was the fact that it was a team.

"The interaction between the athletes was something we were quite keen to understand and do.

"We wanted to get the cyclists caring about track and field who care about the canoeists, who care about taekwondo.

"Most athletes’ experiences tend to be single-sport events.

"Last time around we had athletes in Team Visa for Beijing communicating with one another about what they were doing in their own preparations and what it felt like just at that critical moment where you take off, or you dive, or whatever you do."

Since Team 2012 is a UK-only programme, Grannell emphasised that: "Everywhere else we’ll be marketing London 2012 plus any athletes that we decide to support in those countries around the marketplace."

To read the full interview with Colin Grannell click here.

Contact the writer of this story at [email protected]


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