Harvard alumna Theresa Moore describes her experiences working for Coca Cola developing their Olympic marketing plans at the 1996 games in Atlanta. The games held a special significance for Coke, since Atlanta is their hometown. They had to figure out a way to balance helping to host the games with their normal business functions. Her job, at first, was to interview every department member at Coke to find out what their job was and whether it was critical to the Olympic effort. Using her research, she then had to map out the venue plans for the games and talk to the corporate heads of the company to get them to make an appearance.
During the games, she served as a venue manager at the Omni stadium, where her job was to ensure that whenever a customer interacted with a "coke experience " that it was experienced positively. She also had to deal with ambush marketing. This meant more than simply making sure that a Pepsi product didn't show up, but also included supporting other Olympic sponsors against their competitors. For example, she was forced to send all of her mail through UPS, who was an official sponsor, rather than Fedex which was trying to ambush market them.
After the games, she had to help Coke figure out how to handle the "let down " period and to keep employees feeling engaged even after their event was over. Coke was very careful before the games not to bring on too many full time employees that they couldn't keep afterwards. Thus, even though her division was eliminated after the Olympics left town, Coke offered them jobs in other divisions.
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