The Mound - #42 How to Ruin the Olympics
Welcome to The Mound, a weekly newsletter in which we at Good One Creative pitch— for free — our solutions to the world’s problems.
On a recent episode of the AdMission podcast, Russel spied an opportunity for Australia to further distinguish itself at the Olympics this year: make Hi-Vis the official uniform of the Australian Olympic team.
It’s a - quite literally - brilliant idea, actually. Whilst the rest of the world struggles to capture the rest of the world’s attention using the same handful of primary and secondary colours, Australia could escape the confines of the colour spectrum as we know it - and align ourselves to visual intensity instead.
More than just attention, we dare say this move would win us medals.
If you remember anything of your amateur footy or track-and-field days, you’d remember that generally speaking the kid with the most garish cleats had the most confidence. Occasionally, sure, this confidence was unearned (and how sweet it was when these kids tripped) - but, for the most part, these were the kids to beat.
This is exactly the sort of pressure we should exert upon our competition. Our athletes, even just standing there, should represent the notion of, “Hey, you might want to see this.”
Now, unfortunately, we’ll only get this advantage just once. Not because we’ll get banned or anything - it’s just hard to imagine any country after this Olympics will remain on the low-vis side of the fence; it’s just the nature of competition, isn’t it? Like when the Norwegian Olympic team invented the tracksuit: four years later, we were all wearing them (except for Germany, who looked right stupid undoing their jeans at the swimming block). Or when Japan invented the national anthem, or the Philippines invented running.
Again, it’s a brilliant idea. But - talking about it at the office - we realised that it’ll have to wait until the next Olympics. If you know anything about French (and particularly Parisian) politics, you’ll know that an energetic mob of men and women in Hi-Vis is likely to result in gunfire.
So - just to mix things up - this week we’re going to ask that nobody use our idea. We repeat, this is a very bad idea. So bad, in fact, we wrote a song about it.
You’re welcome, Australia.
