The rules around using the Olympics to promote a brand or service are tight. Very tight. Rule 40 of the IOC Charter states “Except as permitted by the IOC executive board, no competitor, coach, trainer or official who participates in the Olympic Games may allow his person, name, picture or sports performances to be used for advertising purposes during the Olympic Games.”
This extends to ad campaigns being pulled by long term individual sponsors so as not to compromise an athlete. That has happened across the Winter Olympics in the USA, Norway and Australia. Nobody is sure of the ultimate sanction but it is one that would be paid by the athlete, and could extend as far as a medal being taken away. Nobody is willing to take that chance.
The reason it is policed so tightly is that becoming an Olympic sponsor is a very expensive business. Visa, BP, Coca Cola and others will spend hundreds of millions on the right to promote their products against the backdrop of the greatest sporting show on earth. The value lies in the exclusivity.
How that is brought to life for those brands is also changing in dramatic fashion. London 2012 was billed as the first social and the first digital Olympics but even that seems in the foothills compared to the way in which digital is dominating the Winter Games that are on in Russia at the moment.
Visa has revealed that between 30 and 40 per cent of its entire activation budget is now directed towards Digital. Speaking in an interview with AdWeek magazine Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Burke talks about mobile and digital as being central to their ‘everywhere you want to be’ concept of promoting the brand.
He says that the brand has moved dollars to where people are consuming content and that is all through mobile and digital channels.
This seismic shift is a major challenge for traditional media outlets which up until two years ago would have commanded the vast majority of spending. US broadcast giant NBC made up only 6% of its Olympic ad revenues through digital around London. It will be interesting to see how high that figure climbs around the current games cycle and on towards the first European games next year in Azerbaijan and Rio in 2016.
The sports marketing game has changed, changed utterly and while social marketing is scoring some big hits, it is against a backdrop of great care needing to be taken until the IOC rules catch up.
The ‘blackout’ period around the current Olympics kicked in on January 30th and will run until February 26th, three days after the closing ceremony. That is when individual sponsors and advertisers who wish to use the stardust of the Olympians can get their value, albeit after the dragonfly attention span of the world’s sporting audience may well have moved on to the next big thing.
