Beijing Olympics: In Defense of China - Gene DeWitt - MediaBizBloggers.com

I traveled from Moscow to Beijing thirty years ago in anticipation of, respectively, the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and a barter program deal in which I brought footage of the 1976 Olympics for Central China Television (CCTV) to air courtesy of my client Coca-Cola.

A small group of us from McCann-Erickson Worldwide also hoped to establish business connections in China that would be the basis for an expansion of McCann into this emerging third world country which was re-establishing trade relationships with the U.S. for the first time in three decades.

Our hosts from CCPIT (Chinese Council for the Promotion of International Trade) were enthusiastic about airing the Olympics footage in primetime. However, they wondered at my request that the rights to this video be compensated for by 'sponsor' identification for my client. Rather, on the advice of some Japanese TV operators who were in China long before us Americans, they suggested that we pay two different amounts for airing the programming we were offering no cost to them:

• CCTV Rate Card "Plan A" specified a price for the time during which the program would air; and
• "Plan B" listed rates for the advertising that would accompany the program.

Working through multiple interpreters, I tried repeatedly to establish a 'quid pro quo' of bartering the programming itself for the time and ads. No sale.

Then I remembered something I had learned during the flight from Moscow to Tokyo en route to Beijing. I had sat next to a Japanese gentleman who has in charge of developing the new Disney theme park in Japan. After I told him the purpose of my visit to China, he told me that there was one thing that superseded all other issues in dealing with the Chinese and that that was the issue of "face"; i.e., neither party in a negotiation could be seen to lose face as a result of an agreement.

As the representative of CCTV rejected my offer a third time, I realized that airing Coke's program for 'free' could be seen as a loss of face for the Chinese.  And so, without client authorization or discussing it with anyone else, I put my career on the line and thanked our hosts for their consideration and patience and told them that I wished to offer them Coca-Cola's Olympics footage for free, at no cost in gratitude for their hospitality.

Our hosts quite rapidly accepted and equally quickly suggested that it would be in the interests of the Chinese people to know whom to thank for such programming and that therefore each airing would at no cost carry a "brought to you by Coca-Cola" announcement, exactly what we had been seeking.