Hurry—the world only has a few more days to bone up on water polo and fencing.
The 2024 Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony, airing Friday, will kick off two weeks of international competition, and advertisements and brands will be squeezed in between national anthems and slow-motion shots of athletic melodrama.
We at Marketing Brew thought it might make sense to run down some of the sponsorships and ad sales stats for the games, which run through August 11.
Going for gold: After subsequent Olympics ratings disappointments in 2021 and 2022, it’s looking like 2024 could be a comeback year for NBCUniversal, which owns the US broadcast rights to the Olympics through 2032.
During the day, the broadcaster plans to offer at least nine hours of coverage, including live coverage of the swimming, track and field, and gymnastics finals across both linear TV and its streaming service Peacock. In prime time, the broadcaster will air a recap of each day’s competitions. Snoop Dogg and Peyton Manning will join NBC mainstay Mike Tirico for broadcasting duties, because, sure, why not?
In April, Dan Lovinger, NBCU’s president of Olympic and Paralympic partnerships, told reporters that the company had already brought in $1.2 billion in ad sales against the games and was on track to bring in the most ad revenue in Olympic history. The broadcaster has cited the benefits of a more favorable time difference than the previous two Olympics in Tokyo and Beijing, as well as the Covid protocols at those games that made some components of the broadcast more difficult. The 2021 Summer Games in Tokyo games averaged about 15.5 million prime-time viewers, about half as many as the 2012 Summer Games in London.
Meanwhile, Peacock will serve as a “hub” for the games, giving viewers a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style experience around the broadcaster’s coverage, complete with an AI-powered re-creation of Al Michaels’s voice providing audio commentary. There will also be Peacock exclusives, like a highlights show featuring Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson.
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Sponsor turnout: Coca-Cola, Airbnb, Visa, and Procter & Gamble are among the brands participating in the official Olympic Partner Programme, which could mean spending anywhere from $50 million to $200 million, according to Sports Business Journal. Local luxury brand powerhouse LVMH paid a reported €150 million ($163 million) to sponsor the games, and will be “designing medals, dressing French athletes, and providing the champagne for VIP events,” per Bloomberg.
Team USA has its own list of official sponsors, including Michelob Ultra, Nike, Ralph Lauren, and Delta. And plenty of other brands didn’t ink formal deals but are activating around the Olympics anyway, either through direct deals with athletes or through alternate platforms and content.
What to watch: Putting aside any possible record-breaking performances from the athletes themselves, there will be lots of firsts during the summer games. For the first time in Olympic history, there will be an equal split between women and men athletes in the games, capping off what has already been a banner year for women’s sports.
In the run-up to the games, a few media execs pointed out that marketer interest in campaigning around women athletes and teams is similarly high when it comes to this year’s Olympics.
“Brands know that the Olympics are a time when brands know that women’s sports and athletes are front and center,” Rachel Quon, head of operations for the media company Just Women’s Sports, said in an email. “They’re realizing that this is a growing and valuable audience.”