As a former Nike Marketing lead and sports fan at heart, I could not miss the 2024 Olympic Games in France.

Not only is it a celebration of unlimited human potential (and honestly the best atmosphere you can emerge yourself into), but also a huge playground for brands to power up their growth. 

After visiting the Olympics, experiencing some of the brand activations and also doing extensive research online, I have created this overview.
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We will cover: 
1. Olympic games learnings: my takeaways about the games.

2. Marketing sponsorships: did they pay off for key sponsors?

3. Best marketing campaigns

Chapter One. Olympic games learnings: overall takeaways about the games.

There are few interesting lessons we can all take as marketeers, product leads, entrepreneurs from the organization of these 2024 Olympic games.

1. Opening ceremony with nearly 29M+ views, yet most criticized. 

Opening night was incredible in many ways and at the same time one of the most discussed and criticized things on twitter and media for the last two weeks. Why? 

Here is my spicy take. 

The organizers tried to do way too many things at once.

When you try to be inclusive, ecologically friendly, culturally relevant, add hundreds of hidden messages, infuse politics, be cheapest and many more things at once, the result can be confusing. There were some really great ideas, but as “Guardian” said, “Paris is known for its taste but this looked like a motley outfit thrown together”: an overdose of strange performances, unclear storyline and some scenes creating lots of social backlash.
Instead of trying to do it all, choose one thing you want to be remembered for. And be thoughtful about how many different cultures the show will be streamed to.

‍Takeaway: ➡️💡Simplify. Don‘t try to be all things. 

2. Cheapest games - “saving” on everything, is it worth it?

The Paris 2024 Olympics is expected to cost around $10 billion, significantly less than the recent games: Tokyo 2020 ($13.7 billion), Rio 2016 ($23.6 billion), and the most expensive Sochi 2014 Games ($28.9 billion).

Personally, I thought it was great to save $ on almost not building new sports facilities, utilizing current ones and instead we as visitors had to travel across France (we loved it!) 👏 

However saving on beds for athletes or not providing high quality protein food in enough quantity as quite a few complaints ? That‘s simply unacceptable. There should be things you focus on first, always and that’s taking care of athletes who will compete.

Takeaway: ➡️💡Never ever (ever!) compromise on quality and take care of your most important customer. Even when being on budget.

3. Memes, TikTok virality and lots of social wins.‍

This was by far the most activated Olympic Games campaign across all social channels.
The recordings and replays were just spot on - lots of great content captured and shared for viewers to work on and edit for Tik-Tok. Organizers' social media marketing team did a great job with reactive content and so many sports(wo)men became famous thanks to these Olympics.

Both sponsors and teams learned more to use social media than ever before (previously it was mainly TV ads and broadcasters).

You can read about some of the great social media tactics in this article from Morning Brew.

And here are the best memes if you fancy a good laugh.

Chapter Two. The marketing and sponsorships. 

Games have a long list of  partners from long time sponsors like Coca Cola, P&G. Visa and Deloitte to local additions like LVMH and  AirFrance were all official sponsors.
Another first time sponsor for this year (and closest to tech world) was Airbnb.

The Question is - does it actually pay off to sponsor the games?

There are quite a few brands hijacking the games with non sponsored campaigns (and the number of these grows).

Yes, if you are not a sponsor of the Olympic Games, you can still do marketing around it, just following some rules. Nike, Under Armour, McDonalds and many other brands do this year over year pretty successfully.

But first, let’s look at the sponsors and what they did.

Deloitte

Global consulting and audit firm (and my former employer) is a great company, which is apparently really bad at marketing. 

Why do 3 discoordinated campaigns with different narratives, goals, messaging?

• First, talk about business advice to Olympic Committee to differentiate Olympic games and achieve sustainability goals - clear, on point for B2B customers (their clients)
• Second, featuring Team Deloitte with employees across the globe, who are olympic athletes - expensive production and ridiculously low views (we speak 500 on youtube). If it was an internal campaign for employees' motivation - why spend so much money?
• Third, the Firsts campaign, with narrative that podium is not the most important thing and celebrating important firsts such as the Olympic Games Paris 1900 where female athletes competed for the first time, and the first live global broadcast at the Olympic Games Tokyo 1964, as well as athletes Nicola Adams,  the first ever female Olympic boxing champion, Sarah Attar, the first female to represent Saudi Arabia in athletics, South African swimmer Natalie Du Toit, the first amputee swimmer to qualify for the Olympic Games; Algerian 1,500-metre runner Abdellatif Baka, the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games gold medallist who became the first Paralympian to beat the winning time of the Olympic champion in the same event. It was a great campaign idea, yet execution (narrator, tempo of the video) and most importantly the media support behind it made it go almost unnoticed.

AirFrance

Produced such a mediocre video, that it’s painful to watch. 

According to the media the sponsorship included showcasing Business seats, a VR version of an Airbus A350 cockpit, and gastronomic experiences at the Palais de Tokyo during the Olympics.

Have I seen any of this as a visitor and frequent traveler? No, neither in social channels, nor in person, nor in ads. 

It was Air France's first Olympics and their marketing team seem to still operate in a very conservative way. Could have done way better.

Visa

Visa team went for a classic video, a payment activation animation (if you pay with a phone) and launched an app. App Visa Go aimed to provide insights about traveling in France, has a super low amount of installs and surprisingly was not advertised at all, although seems to have an interesting concept.

Visa did good and basic things, but was that enough? 

➡️💡 If you pay for a sponsorship, make sure you also allocate budget for a good creative and social teams and paid ads. Sponsorship on its own is not enough.

‍Chapter Three. The best marketing.

There were a few brands which did great in my opinion. Messaging, execution and quality of output was just great 🤌

And not all of them were sponsors. Here are my top 3.

McDonald's

They focused on one message - INCLUSIVITY of all countries and cultures. Video was spot on, they also brought the global McDonalds bestseller menu to France and took over the majority of bus stops to inform customers about that.

It was visible, well executed and could have driven sales. 

They also utilized French McDonalds’ socials and recently went viral with a joke about removing curry sauce because of the athlete.

Nike

As always, not an official sponsor, however recognized as such by people according to official reports.

Athletes sponsorships and uniform presentations are obviously a must. Buy what a very bold, very targeted video campaign - Winning is not for everyone.  One of the best I have seen in YEARS. 

Among other things they introduced in Paris the A.I.R collection designed in collaboration with athletes with AI. And also took over the Palais Brongniart with an impressive installation.

As Vogue Business says: the market seems to agree: on Thursday, Bank of America upgraded Nike shares from ‘neutral’ to ‘buy’ for the first time in over two years. Shares rose 2.5 per cent on Thursday.

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OMEGA SA

Is one of the sponsors who did really really well, especially from what one can expect from a watch brand.

What matters most for their activations is not a video (although pretty decent) and not classic time tracking, but the way they promote new technologies they have developed and show them off as a live demo during Olympics. 

Omega's AI technology was used for multiple sports, for example for diving events it will track the athletes from the beginning to end of their dive, producing a 3D image while generating metrics such as speed of entry into the water and for the paul vault the AI system will measure the gap between the athlete and the bar to work out what effect that has on jump quality.
Read more about it on Wired.

To sum it all up

The 2024 Olympic Games provided valuable lessons for marketers, product leads, and entrepreneurs.

The opening ceremony was heavily criticized, but not only good PR is quite good for the reach. These Games had record amount of viewers since London 2012 Olympics.
The organizers tried to do too much in messaging and the Games had really vague positioning.
Cost-cutting measures were praised, but compromising on athlete care (as a main customer!)  was seen as a major flaw, underscoring that quality should never be sacrificed.

On a positive note, the social media campaign was a huge success, with creative, viral content engaging audiences globally. In contrast, some sponsors underperformed compared to sponsors in terms of campaign creativity, engagement and business success, demonstrating that you don't need to sponsor an event to do great marketing around it.

What was your favourite Olympic moment?