Frog Zoich: unofficial mascot of the Olympic Games in Sochi

The Organizing Committee of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games has registered intellectual property rights to the informal mascot of the Olympics, frog Zoich.

Three symbols at once were chosen to be the Olympic mascots: Leopard, Polar Bear and Hare. Among the symbols, presented to the contest, was frog Zoich, and it induced a sympathy of many Internet users. As it turned out, this personage was created by order of the very Organizing Committee order as exceptionally viral advertising to attract as much as possible people from the web to the choice of the Olympic mascot.

The Rospatent (Russian patent agency) announced registration of trademarks at its web page. The rights to the mascots Hare, Dolphin, Leopard, Snowball and others were registered. Besides, the Rospatent registered the rights to the mascot Zoich, created by Egor Zhgun, an employee of the "Studiya Artemiya Lebedeva".

Frog Zoich took the first place in the Internet voting "on the first day of dissemination, on September 10, and during the period of three months it gave up the first line for only three days in total." The mascot failed to enter the short-list of the official contest, although more than half a million people watched the mascot Zoich support video on the YouTube, and the news about Zoich had been shown by almost all the leading Russian TV channels and some foreign ones, including the TV channel "Al Jazeera", the "RBC" reports.

Afterwards, Dmitry Chernyshenko, the president of the Organizing Committee, compared frog Zoich with Baba-Yaga (Russian fairy tales personage) and named it a 'protest personage'. "One day, some thirty years (or one hundred thirty), people of Russia will also realize, finally, that the mascot does not have to be a smiling squirrel of the 70s style postcards," Yegor Zhgun, the author of frog Zoich, wrote in his blog.