This summer, the Olympics received some criticism for a
rather exhaustive trademark protection effort in London that successfully
excluded phrases such as “Summer 2012” from being posted by London advertisers
not associated with Olympics.
Thankfully, with McDonald’s, Visa and Coca-Cola
sponsorships, Summer 2012 was allowed to continue and we were not all forced to
skip from June to September.
Anyway, I decided to use Google’s verbatim search to find
phrases closely associated with the Olympics that the International Olympic
Committee probably should have trademarked but did not. I define the Olympic Phrase Index as the
proportion of the time the phrase is associated with the Olympics.
Some of my favorites.
|
Phrase
|
#Google Hits of the phrase
|
#Google Hits when ‘Olympic’ and/or ‘Olympics’ is excluded
|
Olympic Phrase Index
|
|
Children under so much pressure
|
45800
|
41700
|
0.09
|
|
1980 Invasion of Afghanistan
|
11400
|
9590
|
0.16
|
|
Ran out of condoms*
|
21700
|
18000
|
0.17
|
|
East German judge
|
39100
|
29100
|
0.26
|
|
Tape-Delay
|
3950000
|
2680000
|
0.32
|
|
By one-one hundredth of a second
|
69000
|
33200
|
0.52
|
|
First three-time host
|
49200
|
21800
|
0.56
|
|
Doves were incinerated
|
5
|
2
|
0.60
|
|
Barefoot through the streets of
Rome
|
5960
|
1610
|
0.73
|
|
Competed in the nude**
|
695000
|
30800
|
0.96
|
*Google SafeSearch set to ‘Strict’
**Google SafeSearch set to ‘Moderate’
as the ‘Strict’ setting filters results with the word ‘nude’.
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