Helikon Media Selected to Guide Brand and Communications Efforts for Beijing 2008 Olympic Bid Atlanta, GA  (January 4, 2001)  Helikon Media, an Atlanta-based strategic brand management agency has been selected to help plan the City of Beijing’s communications strategy for the city’s bid to be named the Host City for the 2008 Olympic Summer Games.  Helikon’s two Managing Principals, George Hirthler and Terrence Burns, together have years of Olympic bidding, Olympic sponsorship planning and Olympic brand planning expertise.  The Beijing project is Hirthler’s fifth Olympic bid campaign including Atlanta, Istanbul, Klagenfurt and Stockholm.  “I am looking forward to applying the knowledge learned from my previous bid experiences to Beijing,” said Hirthler, “all Olympic bids are unique, but the Games in China would offer an historical legacy to the entire world.”  Burns, who has worked both as an Olympic sponsor with Delta Air Lines, and as a brand marketing consultant for the International Olympic Committee agrees, “Beijing offers an historic and enlightened choice for the Host City in 2008, not unlike Tokyo in ’64 or Seoul in ’88 – in both of those cases the Olympic Games were a catalyst for immense social and economic change within those countries – the power of the Olympic brand is indeed beyond sport.” Helikon Media is a strategic brand management agency delivering brand assessment and planning, creative execution and marketing consultation to clients worldwide. << Back to News