As yet another wave of the Olympic Family are cruising effortlessly through T5, zooming up the M4 and snuggling down under their cosy duvets in the Olympic Village, they may be unaware that today is a critical date for marketers.

Geraint Lloyd-Taylor at law firm, Lewis Silkin, has helpfully outlined the critical dates and actions required to keep marketers on the straight and narrow in his post here. 

Libertarians suffering different degrees of outrage have already exercised themselves on the contradictions inherent in embracing the Olympic spirit, while also allowing the Olympic Family to pick and choose the laws they might want to follow or change.

Here's a link to The Spectator's point of view. And another to the entertaining, but almost nsfw, The Kernel's viewpoint.

My concern is that in its desire to appease corporate sponsors, LOCOG may have dumped both the baby and bath water on the astroturf (or whatever). Personally, I don't perceive a great deal of warmth toward the Olympic organizers, right now.

Perhaps the price of putting up a legal firewall against ambush marketing will backfire.

Its hard to feel much warmth towards LOCOG when you know that 280 Enforcement Officers are right now roaming the streets looking for offences against the Olympic logo and/or the various words LOCOG has annexed for the duration.

Or that businesses which manage to get their employees in to work in central London during the games have been met by cheery messages such as this one from TV Licensing.

It makes me feel quite nostalgic for the Queen's Jubilee.

At the Jubilee, I stood shivering in a damp tent on the village green with rain driving horizontally through an open tent flap - but at least I wasn't concerned that my kids were going to be arrested for making their own Union Jacks to wave - or worse still might be ejected for wearing the wrong brand of trainers to the party.