How to become a "golden sponsor" of the Olympic Games

The Olympics in Sochi and the Paralympic Games not so long ago ended. In the atmosphere of a sports festival, we decided to pay special attention to the material on how sponsors and investors of the Olympic movement (both off-line and online) can benefit from this event or, on the contrary, put their entire business at risk.

By the opening of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, i.e. 4 years ago, Elastic Path launched an online store. I met with the co-founder and executive vice president of Elastic Path, Mark Williams (Mark Williams), to learn more about the problems that arise if almost all sales take place in a short time in just two weeks.

Olympic-related e-commerce

It turned out that the sale of Olympic souvenirs is actually a very changeable activity. Oprah [Oprah Winfrey] was enough to appear once in mittens with Olympic symbols so that after 40 thousand pairs of such mittens would fly apart in 2 hours. Another example: the most preferred color when buying clothes with Canadian hockey uniform was red, but exactly as long as Canadians, the home team, did not win the match, dressed in white, thus provoking the appearance of excess clothing of the not so popular red .
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“For us, this is [participation in the Olympics as a partner - approx. transl.] became a chance to look at your own service through the eyes of the user and realize the difficulties associated with the assortment, sale and return of goods that retailers face every day. In addition, the Olympics helped us understand how important it is to be prepared for the opening prospects, ” says Williams .

Team Sponsorship and Olympic Brand

Sports team sponsorship is a popular technique used by brands to attract attention. The Olympic Games are one of the most efficient international trading platforms, so investor companies can rightly expect their investments to pay off. As Kim Inglis of the Financial Post writes:

“Consider Procter & Gamble, a consumer goods company with branches in more than 180 countries. Their sponsorship of the US team at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010 turned into a resounding success, as a result of which additional sales amounted to about $ 100 million. The brand has greatly benefited from advertising, which, unlike the average "Olympic" indicators, has increased brand awareness by 39%, and the customer response has increased by 62%. "

"Parasitic" marketing

The potential effectiveness of investments depends on the fact that buyers associate the company with the Olympic Games, however, this also attracts impostors and predators who are trying to push themselves using the atmosphere of the Olympics, without actually being either sponsors or partners of the Games. Companies of the so-called “parasitic marketing” openly or on the sly try to pretend to be Olympic brands using the symbol of the Olympics - the ring, the date or place of its conduct, or any other form of parasitism. Not without risk share:

The Canadian Olympic Committee sent a warning letter to The North Face, claiming that their new clothing line compromised their trademark, trying to appeal to the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. The North Face is not an official Olympiad sponsor - Bay, for example, spent millions to become an official Olympics apparel sponsor. But The North Face launched an “international collection” in November, featuring a t-shirt with a print “February 7, 2014” - the opening date of the Olympiad, as well as other clothes with an RU 14 patch, which is also a hint of the 2014 Sochi Olympics in Russia .

Since the Olympic brands are under such tight control, parasitic companies need to think and weigh the risks they take, decide whether it is worth the trouble: will it destroy the company's image, or vice versa - will it improve? And what if the entire product line is banned?

2012 and the growing popularity of the first ever Olympic social media environment

In 2012, at the London Summer Olympics, there was a significant change in how communication with Olympic brands was made. Through more than 150 million tweets sent over 16 days of competition, the crowd, television viewers, partner companies and athletes themselves have expanded the scope of consumer and brand interaction, which now also includes real-time communication with company representatives and takes into account the views of all participants in the dialogue.

The accomplishments of Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps caused the greatest number of messages during the Olympics, while the Spice Girls who spoke at the closing ceremony earned 116 thousand tweets per minute. The opportunity to openly express their thoughts led to the appearance on the Web of personal opinions of users, not all of whom had content that was appropriate for the Olympiad format.

The Greek triple jump athlete was removed from the Olympic competition after she posted a racist joke on Twitter. Voula Papachristou was expelled from the national team for mocking African migrants and expressing sympathy for far-right political parties.

While the voice of viewers and athletes, mainly through social networks, sounds much louder than any single advertising campaign, Twitter’s aggressive environment means that brands - including Olympiad sponsors - should be prepared and have a backup plan in case of such “substandard »Sendings.

2014 and the rise of the video industry on demand

Now that the 2014 Olympic Movement in Sochi is in full swing, the paradigm for viewing scheduled TV broadcasts is influenced by the number of views of streaming video requested from mobile, tablets and game consoles. Our friends from the Adobe Digital Index write:

As part of such sporting events as the Olympics, World Cup, “March Madness” [March Madness or “March Madness” is the name of the annual championship of student basketball teams in the USA - approx. trans.] passes too many matches to fit everything in the traditional broadcast. In the past, viewers, of course, were limited only by the program of television programs and those that were shown in prime time, while the television company was tough to select content, leaving much of it off the air.

Nowadays, media companies, however, can provide viewers with video clips from the scene in real time, and content on demand, as well as monetize these projects, during the broadcasting by dynamically embedding advertising into video.

This change in the viewer's behavior pattern will undoubtedly have an impact on the purchase of advertising time in the media: now most of the advertising time will be allotted for dynamic advertising or sponsorship appeals within the streaming video. The ability to instantly play on an athlete's popularity, victory, gol, or crushing defeat — an astute marketer can use all these tricks to successfully integrate a brand into a new paradigm for watching videos.

Olympic Games in the age of Google Glass

Another promising trend worth mentioning is watching sports events using Google Glass:

By selecting data among the trillions of visits, the Adobe Digital Index determined that Google Glass is developing as a future leader in the field of information consumption devices, rather than a tool for shopping. Website management notes that the most popular among Google Glass owners are media and entertainment resources, among which sports are leading.

Google Glass can not only change the platform from which we will watch the future Olympic Games, but also the viewing angle due to “switching” from the remote camera to the first-person format, allowing us to see what is happening through the eyes of the athlete.

Olympic Games of the Future

Streaming video, glasses and other wearable gadgets that can measure pulse and other vital signs have every chance to immerse us in the world of sports not only during the Olympic Games, events, ceremonies - even outside the official dates of the Games they open up the possibility of extending the Olympics and making it something permanent, and not an episodic event that happens every 4 years.