Atlanta, Brought To You By …

Undulating waves of magenta, hunter green, blue and gold dance in the warm breeze, color-coordinated harbingers of the 1996 Olympics.

They’re the tasteful yet commercial banners appearing on street posts and buildings inside Atlanta’s Olympic Ring, part of the official look: a painstakingly planned welcome to visitors and TV cameras.

But wait, as they say in marketing land, there’s more.

Behind the symmetry and planning, another kind of herald to the Olympics - a more commercial one - is making its mark on the skyline.

“This Bud’s for the World,” blares one beer maker. “Just Wait’ll We Get Our Hanes on the Games,” yells an underwear ad. An electronics company quietly proves it’s a member of the club with an image of a straining weightlifter.

Even politicians are in on the act. Fulton County Sheriff Jackie Barrett, up for re-election, has her moniker on a sign along the Downtown Connector that “welcomes the world.”

“It’s starting to look like what I expected,” Sabina Vitello, 34, of Duluth, Ga., said as she showed off the city and the unfinished Centennial Olympic Park to her niece.

The city has just enough of a commercial message - at least so far, says Naveen Donthu, an associate professor of marketing at Georgia State University who specializes in outdoor advertising. City ordinances prohibit temporary signs in the Olympic Ring larger than 200 square feet in size or more than 35 feet high.

“I only hope they don’t start overdoing it as the Olympics comes closer,” Donthu said. “There’s an optimal information load level. If you cross that, then people start tuning it out.”

That’s exactly Leon Eplan’s fear - that visitors won’t see the beauty of the city’s trees, history, natural landscape and architecture. For him, the billboards, banners and color are all part of the Games’ impermanence.