To be honest, I’m not quite sure which entity, or entities, within Lloyds Banking Group are sponsors of London 2012.  Among their portfolio of brands, it seems that Lloyds TSB and Scottish Widows are, but Cheltenham & Gloucester, Halifax and Bank of Scotland aren’t.

In any event, as the Games excitement-ometer plateaus at fever pitch, I bet those at Lloyds TSB and Widows responsible for making the most of the sponsorship – “activating” it in sponsorship-ese – are looking enviously in the direction of their counterparts at C&G and Halifax, and thinking to themselves how much easier life would be if they didn’t have to bother.  Activating a big-ticket, high-profile, long-duration sponsorship is a real shag.  And, I must say, a challenge that seems to be rather defeating those responsible for tackling it at the moment.

If you go to the Lloyds TSB website – go on, try it, lloydstsb.com – at first glance you won’t realise that the bank is an Olympics sponsor at all.  That’s because, amazingly, there’s no trace of the Games, not even a logo, on the home page above the fold.  True, if you scroll down to where you usually find the health warning and the site map, you’ll find a link to their 2012 site, with the heading “Follow Our Local Heroes At The Games” – but, honestly, who scrolls down below the fold?

Their 2012 website, lloydstsblondon2012.co.uk, is unsurprisingly a good deal more Games-focused, but it’s still remarkably lacking in news, liveliness and up-to-date-ness.  Much of it is written in what is now an inappropriate future tense (“the Games will be a great event…”) and the main thing the site does to provide up-to-date content is to give a link to teamgb.com, which I think is a bit of a cop-out.

Scottish Widows try a bit harder – at least they do show a 2012 logo and a link to a 2012 blog by Roger Black on their home page above the fold – but actually the link to Roger’s blog shares a rotating panel with two other topical features headed “Life Assurance” and “See Our Latest Tool,”  which, together, rather put Roger in his place.

This distinctly half-arsed (well, more like quarter-arsed) effort is in sharp contrast to the heavy hitters.  I looked randomly at the home pages for McDonald’s, Adidas and VISA, and found that all three had completely remade their websites to that they appear completely focused on the Olympics.

I suppose that to be fair to Lloyds TSB, there could be a touch of “business as usual during the current emergency” about their astoundingly low-key approach.  If you’re going to their website to do some online banking, or to find details of their first-time-buyer mortgages, at least you won’t be distracted or sidetracked by any Olympic Games nonsense, whereas on the McDonald’s site it’s significantly harder than usual to check out your local branch’s opening hours or investigate the nutritional value of a quarter pounder with cheese.

But on the other hand, if you’re worried about your hugely expensive sponsorship getting in the way of honest, no-nonsense, transaction-hungry customers, I’d suggest that the thing to do is not sign up for the sponsorship, rather than sign up for it, pay the money and then tuck it away below the fold where no-one will see it.

Oh well.  It’ll all be over soon.  And while McDonald’s, Adidas and VISA will have a ton of work to do restoring their websites to business as usual, at least Lloyds TSB will only have to restore the health warning and the site map to their customary below-the-fold positions.