By Jeanne Bonner
For the AJC
As London prepares for the 2012 Olympics, the city's officials have been barnstorming around North America to establish ties with other cities that have hosted the games.
Few are receiving more attention than Atlanta, which hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics.
London Olympics officials have already met with security experts who worked at the Atlanta Games. The British city also hopes to emulate Atlanta's preference for construction that's reconfigured for other uses after the Games.
A former official with the British Consul-General in Atlanta, Michael Charlton, is in charge of Think London, a key agency courting international investment in the run-up to the Olympics. In September, Charlton and other London officials held meetings to showcase potential opportunities for Atlanta.
"The London bid promised a significant legacy for the UK capital and I believe the model for inspiration here is Atlanta 1996," Charlton said via e-mail from London.
Charlton said Atlanta companies are in a good position to go after part of the $1.7 billion in remaining contracts for the London Olympics. Negotiations will culminate in signed agreements after the Vancouver Winter Olympics in February.
Insignia Promotions of Roswell expects to sign a contract early next year that may be worth as much as $20 million to provide t-shirts and other promotional items for the London Olympics.
"They don't want anyone to be distracted from Vancouver," said J.T. Marburger, president of Insignia, explaining the schedule for signing contracts.
Other Atlanta companies in negotiations include Fuzebox, which creates 3-D-style content, and NanoLumens of Norcross, which designs lightweight, flexible digital displays.
Bigger Atlanta companies have deals, including longtime Olympic underwriters UPS and Coca-Cola, and Helios Partners, a Buckhead firm that negotiated the rights for the London Games' first major sponsor, Lloyds.
UPS will be the official logistics company for both the London Olympics and Paralympic Games.
Think London has aggressively courted even the smallest of Atlanta companies to pull off what is likely to be the most environmentally-friendly, digitally-oriented Olympics in the history of the Games. For example, British officials have repeatedly reached out to NanoLumens, and have introduced the company to potential partners in England that will be bidding on Olympic contracts.
The attention is unusual considering that NanoLumens is a startup that has yet to produce any revenue.
"We are thrilled with the attention," said the company's president, John Wilson. "They had not only identified and reached out to us in one-on-one meetings, but then they put together conference calls with folks in London that have related business."
The embrace bodes well for Atlanta companies looking for worldwide exposure during the Olympics and permanent access to the British marketplace.
The 2012 games will bolster the already robust business ties between London and Atlanta. There are 345 British companies with offices in Georgia, said Annabelle Malins, the new British consul-general for Atlanta and the southern states.
Georgia companies exported $1.3 billion in goods and services to Great Britain last year, including wood pulp and paper products.
London's approach to the games will also tap into a growing Atlanta specialty: digital entertainment. The 2012 games will use what officials are calling a "digital skin" that will surround Olympic venues with dynamic displays to show news, visitor information, event results and entertainment. That means companies that can provide either digital content or the infrastructure required to deliver it are in high demand.
That development has excited members of Atlanta's digital entertainment community, including Fuzebox, which creates 3-D-style content that does not require viewers to wear 3-D glasses.
"It's a place where you can try out new ideas and concepts on a global stage, and in this case, for the Atlanta digital world, it [will bring] discovery of our skills to the rest of the world," said Les Ottolenghi, a Fuzebox founder.
The Atlanta company is in negotiations with several Olympic sponsors about providing digital content. During the 1996 Olympics, Ottolenghi ran a company called AgentWare that provided software for displays at the World of Coke.
Companies with a hyper-environmental approach will also mesh well with the London Olympics, which has made sustainability a priority.
Marburger of Insignia has a contract with Coca-Cola that licenses him to manufacture promotional t-shirts from plastic recycled Coke cans. He has proposed providing the same type of products for the Olympics.
"When Think London came to Atlanta, they sought me out and said, 'We love what you're doing,'" Marburger said. "When I told them we would make the merchandise from recycled bottles right there from London, they loved that."
Other Atlanta companies are positioned well because of expertise borne directly out of the 1996 Games.
Chris Welton, for example, parlayed his Olympic connections into starting his own firm, Helios Partners, which negotiates promotional contracts for sponsors of major sporting events. In early 1996 he had created a marketing firm for the International Olympic Committee. He later sold it to the IOC, and in 2006 began negotiating promotional rights for London Olympic sponsors.
"We advise companies who are looking to sponsor or are sponsoring major sporting events, so the Olympics is right in our wheelhouse," said Welton. "It's probably where we have the most expertise."
Helios, which is based in Buckhead and has an office in London, has negotiated an Olympic sponsorship deal for the venerable British bank, Lloyd's, which, as the Games' first official sponsor, paid about 70 million pounds for top-level promotional rights.
Welton declined to cite specific terms but said his firm typically earns the equivalent of 3 percent to 5 percent of a deal. In the case of the Lloyd's deal, that would amount to between $3.5 million and $6 million.