Mayor Bloomberg unveiled an expensive new Olympics advertising campaign yesterday, less than three weeks before a key Olympics review committee jets into town.

The ads are meant to excite local residents about the possibility of the city hosting the 2012 Summer Games. The Olympics logos and signs are to be plastered on 13,000 taxicabs, 4,000 subway cars, and 7,000 buses across the five boroughs, with exhortations reminiscent of a huge high-school pep rally:

“Every Country Gets Home Field Advantage.”
“People Will Speak Your Language.”
“Humanity Will Shine.”

Those are just three of the 10 slogans the multimillion-dollar advertising campaign will roll out in the next week or so as the city’s 2012 committee tries to get New Yorkers into the spirit of the quadrennial athletics competition.

“We’re going to make sure it’s in everybody’s face,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday. “Our bid to host the 2012 Games is a marathon, not a sprint, and for New York City, the next big marker comes later this month when the IOC’s Evaluation Commission arrives for its four-day assessment.”

It is during that visit, beginning February 20, that the mayor wants to put New York in its best light so it can win out over the other finalists: Madrid, London, Paris, and Moscow. The International Olympic Committee is to select the host city July 6, by secret ballot at Singapore. Mr. Bloomberg envisions the Games as a “transforming” event for the city. He said he saw how hosting the Olympics changed Athens and he hopes the same thing will happen in New York.

“A lot of the infrastructure is already here,” the mayor said, calling that one of the strengths of the city’s bid. The IOC commission is visiting the five finalists to assess the technical aspects of each bid.

When it comes to the factors that help a city win selection for the Olympics, “there is a park-bench wisdom of what helps and hurts,” the mayor said yesterday. The evaluators are looking for a city that will help the Olympics in its effort to foster world peace; that has the venues, facilities, and management necessary to run the games without a hitch, and that offers particularly good facilities for individual sports. On the venues question, Mr. Bloomberg made another pitch yesterday for the West Side development project, urging New Yorkers to support a Jets stadium if they expect to win the bid. The New York Sports & Convention Center would serve, among other things, as the site of the 2012 opening and closing ceremonies.

“Without the stadium, New York City just will not seem united enough to have the Olympics, and the IOC told us that, that’s no secret,” the mayor said.

The deputy mayor who has been the point man on the 2012 Olympics, Daniel Doctoroff, visited Paris and London this week, as part of a push to spread New York’s message in Europe as well, the Associated Press reported yesterday from London.

“It’s very important for members of the IOC to see our commitment to this process,” the AP quoted Mr. Doctoroff as saying. The IOC’s evaluators were to start their four-day inspection of Madrid’s facilities today. Their next stop is London, followed by New York February 21-24, Paris, and finally, between March 14 and 17, Moscow.