The Gruen team will analyse Olympics
DECONSTRUCTING the advertising and marketing juggernaut that is the Olympic Games has been a long-time dream of the Gruen team.
Their once-in-every-four-years chance finally becomes a reality this week with the premiere of the four-part London 2012 special Gruen Sweat.
Gruen Sweat - ABC1 - Wednesday at 8.30pm
"We've been thinking about doing something around the Olympics since we came up with the idea (of the show)," host Wil Anderson said.
"We've got a lot of stuff. We've got way too much stuff. We probably should have been doing Sweat from the beginning of this year."
Anderson and a panel of ad experts, lead by regulars Todd Sampson and Russel Howcroft, will look at all aspects of what Anderson describes as "the world's biggest marketing festival".
"We're going to look at it from the top down," he said.
"From how closely the Olympics control their own brand and the way they control their footage, to how it's all paid for. From an advertiser's point of view, what are they trying to get out it?
"We'll also look at the athletes and how their lives might change from endorsements."
After Sweat, the show will go into a regular series of Gruen Planet, which has replaced the original Gruen Transfer format.
"There are four or five episodes of Planet last year that I think are the best things we've ever done," Anderson said.
"For us, we always thought Planet was just Transfer on steroids.
"Because the ABC made us do a series of Transfer and Planet back to back, we had to put in these artificial differences that really shouldn't' have been there.
"Now that Transfer doesn't exist any more, Planet can be Transfer. Something I'm really looking forward to is incorporating our favourite things from both shows."
Following on from the past Worst Ad and Worst Product awards, the new series will feature the Personal Worst Award. "It's a look at the worst acting performances by sports people in ads," Anderson said.
"We've got 13 episodes and we've already got 20 (examples) of the personal worst."
