(FORTUNE Magazine) – As anyone who watched the Winter Olympics on TV can attest, the real competition at Nagano wasn't on the snow or ice but in the slush of official corporate sponsorship. Whether signing on as full-fledged Official Olympic Sponsors or just as the Official Telecommunications Sponsor of the U.S. Ski Team, marketers clearly saw the Games as little more than a giant co-branding opportunity.

But the Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett recently completed a poll that cast some doubt on the value of official sponsorships. According to the data, most people who watched the Olympics on TV couldn't distinguish between Official Olympic Sponsors and other big-name companies that ran commercials during or around the Games. Nike, for example, was not an official sponsor, but its February advertising was so heavily Olympic-themed that 73% of those surveyed thought the sneaker firm had official status.

Official sponsorship rarely comes on the cheap (the price at Nagano ran upwards of $40 million per company), so that poll probably isn't too popular right now in the marketing community. Wouldn't it be great if corporations could unilaterally declare themselves the Official Whatever of Whatever without all the licensing paperwork and expense? Well, M&M/Mars has done precisely that. With the year 2000 looming, the confectioner has begun promoting M&M's as "The Official Candy of the New Millennium."

It's an unusually clever campaign: Since "M" is the Roman numeral for 1,000, the candy's name literally adds up to 2,000--giving the brand an unrivaled millennium tie-in. Better still is the firm's ad copy, which mocks the notion of commercializing 2000 even as it does exactly that. A sarcastic voice-over at the end of one TV spot says, "M&M's--blatantly exploiting the new millennium," which is just amusing enough to keep people from noticing that M&M's is, you know, blatantly exploiting the new millennium.

Almost overlooked amid all the millennial hoopla, however, is the fact that M&M/Mars has created a self-validating official sponsorship. Nobody controls the "official rights" to 2000, so anyone can claim its imprimatur. It's so simple--no astronomical fees to pay, no licensing hassles, no silly rules about official logo placement. It's a brilliant end-run around standard sponsorship mechanisms.

M&M/Mars won't comment on its marketing strategies, advertising expenditures, market research data, or anything else a reporter might want to know, so the story behind this very intelligent campaign will have to go untold. But Hillel Schwartz, a senior fellow at a progressive policy foundation called the Millennium Institute, sees some intriguing factors at work. He notes that while the pitches for other millennium-associated products, such as the (oddly spelled) Mazda Millenia, have been based on a combination of futurism, progressivism, and technocracy--in short, the brave new world--a comfort food like M&M's turns this notion on its head. "The millennium isn't being used here as an uplift for a product that needs to be modernized," says Schwartz. "M&M's come off here not as the official candy for a new world but rather as the official candy that will assure you of continuity in the new millennium." In other words, if you're stressing out over all the hype and buildup about 2000, don't panic--M&M's are still here, same as always.

Other millennial pitches are at hand as well. One of the more interesting initiatives is the Milleniad [sic] Licensing Corp. The brainchild of Peter Aykroyd (father of comic Dan Aykroyd, whose recent film was tellingly entitled Blues Brothers 2000), the organization hopes to raise funds for charity by licensing its name and logo to large corporations, and has retained the Creative Artists Agency to approach prospective sponsors.

Schwartz thinks M&M/Mars could score a coup by moving in a similarly altruistic direction. "If they wanted a brilliant sequel to this campaign," he says, "they could donate a certain portion of their profits in 1999 to a public welfare project, like Unesco or the World Food Bank, and then they could truly cement their connection to the millennium."

Not bad, but why stop there? Why not dream big? Imagine it: M&M's, Official Junk Food of the World Food Bank.

PAUL LUKAS, author of Inconspicuous Consumption, obsesses over the details of consumer culture so you don't have to.