By Mark Zamuner, President Juice Media
.png)
The Olympic Games brought together thousands of the best athletes in the world; they also focused the eyes of a major global audience in one place. By all accounts, this year’s installment in Paris was a smashing success for everyone involved, from the athletes and advertisers to the networks and viewers.
This year represented a bit of a return to form for the summer games. The Tokyo Olympics in 2020 were an interesting test case, occurring at the height of the pandemic. The result had some brands like Toyota being more cautious with their spend. Yet in spite of the odd circumstances, ad revenue still outperformed the Brazil games of 2016.
The Paris games this year were even more compelling for advertisers, particularly here in America. With a more West-friendly time zone for events compared to Tokyo (and the Beijing Winter Games of 2022), in addition to the more energetic viewing experience given the presence of live audiences, this year’s Olympics felt more like games of the past. Advertisers seized the opportunity, with ads sold estimated to exceed $1.2B.
With NBC Universal broadcasting the games, viewers were able to choose how they watched events; either live or streaming through Peacock. This more on-demand viewing experience fostered exposure to a more diverse roster of events (breakin’, anyone?), which also meant more diverse opportunities for advertisers. In all, ratings were excellent for the games, with Nielsen and NBC revealing an average total audience of 30.6 million viewers over the 17-day event, an improvement over recent Olympics.
Recently, we attended another event in France: the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which gave us something of a primer on the strategies leading brands and advertisers were going to roll out during the games. Now that the torch has been extinguished, here are some of the key ad trends that caught our attention during the Olympics.
Trend 1: Brands leveraging social trends to crack Gen Z
Brands and advertisers have been working for years to tap into Gen Z's buying power, and the Olympic games continued that project.
It’s long been understood that Gen Z is the generation most dialed into social media, with some surveys showing that 85% of respondents claim that their buying decisions have been influenced by social media. For brands, this Olympics meant leveraging social media trends in traditional media. At Cannes, multiple brands, including Guinness and Heinz, spoke about how they planned to use social media to appeal to younger audiences.
It also helped that this Olympics gave audiences the most options on how they view events. With Peacock streaming events, viewers — especially younger viewers who primarily consume media on mobile devices — were able to access events on demand rather than need to tune in live to NBC broadcasts. These digital streaming options were also creating new opportunities for advertisers. NBCUniversal offered programmatic advertising options at much lower rates than traditional broadcasts, which opened the door to smaller brands being able to advertise during the games. For brands looking to speak to Gen Z, these games presented new avenues to meet them where they are.
For their part, the Olympics themselves were looking for virality and a younger-skewing appeal. Between the viral and controversial opening ceremony to the active promotion of athletes as influencers via TikTok, the Olympics appeared to be trying to court a younger audience. The addition of Snoop Dogg to the NBC commentary team also represented an appeal to more social media-connected audiences who were looking for more unique ways to connect to the games.
Trend 2: Athlete-brand sponsorships with a focus on fashion
With a rising spotlight on women’s athletics, many brands at Cannes spoke about the opportunities that brands could see through partnerships with female athletes. The lines between sports and fashion have been blurring for years, but an Olympics in the fashion capital of the world provided a best-case scenario for these joint ventures.
Fashion brands have been working their way into the games in a number of ways. SKIMS continued to sponsor Team USA for the third consecutive Olympics, this time pivoting their brand to a more inclusive messaging and product mix that celebrated the diversity of their clientele. And, due to relaxed athlete sponsorship rules, brands were able to work more indirectly with athletes through social media campaigns and other non-overt branded promotions.
Beyond just athlete sponsorship, one unique way fashion entered the sponsorship realm was through Figs, which outfitted Team USA’s medical team—a first-of-its-kind partnership from any country.
The marquee melding of fashion and athletics, however, was the event’s largest local sponsor, LVMH. The luxury brand conglomerate will be featured prominently on everything from branded activations to the metals themselves.
Trend 3: An increased brand focus on purpose + authenticity
Two of the biggest buzzwords at Cannes were purpose and authenticity. In challenging markets, it can be hard to maintain purpose-based marketing initiatives that may not always deliver immediate ROI. However with increasing competition, the brands that succeed are the ones that build an authentic connection with their customers and demonstrate a clear purpose. In the Olympic games, brands looked to align themselves with athlete stories that expressed the virtues of their brand.
P&G, for example, has always been a leader in purpose-based marketing. Their "proud sponsor of moms" campaign was extended to the Olympics with their “thank you, mom” ads. This year they also delivered an activation that showed how authentic that message is by sponsoring the first-ever Olympic Village nursery, recognizing that a number of athletes are also parents. This activation provided an avenue for the brand to take a leadership stance within the category, fully aligned to its product portfolio and super authentic to its purpose orientation.
These Olympic games showed brands taking big swings that hit and missed in equal measure. Eli Lilly’s “One Body” film and multimedia campaign was highlighted for its ability to connect the athleticism of Olympians to the everyday human body, Omega executed a beautiful vision that expressed their brand as a true love letter to Paris. Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini AI ad “went viral for all the wrong reasons”.
---
The Olympics bring out the best in all of us, with inspiring athlete stories that demonstrate the peak of human potential and stoke the pride of nations. For advertisers, it’s a powerful opportunity to associate a brand with something truly aspirational. The brands that came away with the gold seized the moment and tapped into record audiences.
