Rio Countdown: So Far, the Most Consistent Performer Is Advertising
Besides the robberies and the virus, this is also the highest-grossing Olympics ever for advertising
Besides the robberies and the virus, this is also the highest-grossing Olympics ever for advertising
Almost everything you've heard lately about the 2016 Rio Olympics, which open on August 5, has been bad news: the Chinese delegation robbed, athletes pulling out one after another, the Zika virus running wild. Rio, it seems, was never going to be short on talking points.
Here is some hard data. By the end of March, NBC had already sold more than $1 billion in Olympics advertising, hitting that mark a full four months earlier than it did before the 2012 London Games.
Olympic ad revenue has climbed for a decade. At the 2008 Beijing Games, NBCUniversal took in $821 million; four years later the figure was $1.3 billion. Seth Winter, the NBCUniversal vice president in charge of ad sales for the sports and news division, says he expects this year's total to beat London by 50%.
Olympics-related content has drawn more than 7.8 billion views on YouTube. Besides the sports-star and classic-match clips everyone loves, 5% of those views — about 390 million — went to Olympics ads.
The Olympics are the world's biggest sports property, and they are inherently positive and inspiring: an absolutely safe subject for an advertiser. Whether or not you watch, no sporting event on earth draws more people or carries more weight. Every advertiser that can reach that tier is a leader in its industry. In fact, they want only the best — or, to put it another way, the only one going.
The business model the American businessman Peter Ueberroth found for the Olympics in 1984 worked like this: sell exclusive television rights country by country, a right that is still one of the core revenue streams in big-time sport; then cut the number of sponsors to one per industry, and use that category exclusivity, plus wider and longer ad exposure, to lift the price of Olympic sponsorship to a new level.
Ueberroth set a floor of $4 million per sponsorship. At the 1988 Seoul Games, top-tier sponsorship cost about $10 million; today that figure is nearly seven times higher.
To protect its official partners' advertising rights, the IOC has always policed ads strictly. Non-official sponsors may not use any Olympic element in their advertising, the athletes included — even companies that have been supporting those very athletes' training for the past four years.
That changed this year too. Under the latest version of Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter, non-official sponsors may now put Olympic athletes in their ads. Certain words remain forbidden, of course — "Rio," "gold medal," even "summer." On top of that, the waiver application has to be filed before January of the Olympic year, and the ad cannot go live later than that March.
For companies good at playing the edges, that is plenty. Take Under Armour's "RULE YOURSELF" series, which has been collecting awards all year — the spot with "Flying Fish" Michael Phelps stuck with a lot of people. As one QDaily reader put it in the comments: it feels like Phelps would owe this ad an apology if he doesn't win gold.
By the count of the video analytics firm Zefr, two of the five most-watched ad brands are official sponsors, Visa and Nike; the other three are Puma, Adidas and Under Armour. (Yes: Nike, long the master of ambush marketing, has finally displaced Adidas as the official outfitter of the Rio Olympics this year.)
Apparel, credit cards and food are the top three categories for Olympics advertising. Those industries line up closely with the ads we've picked out to share below.
Sit with these Olympic spots from the best ad people in the world for a minute and you'll find they fall into roughly two kinds.
The first starts from what the athletes have lived through — "dreams" and "sweat," "greatness" and "loneliness," "longing" and "doubt." Discipline and hard work beyond what ordinary people can manage always command respect, and the private misery behind the glory, even the dull repetition of daily training, turns out to be material that moves people.
The second kind sets out to capture the sheer scale that only the Olympics have. This year 201 countries and regions are competing in Rio (out of 225 in the world), and many different cultures meet under a single sacred Olympic spirit. Delivering that in a few minutes of film is genuinely hard, and worth looking forward to.
The two we picked today at least both involved an enormous amount of shooting.
Samsung: The Anthem
Agency: Leo Burnett
As an official top-tier sponsor of the Rio Olympics, Samsung shot this one from a wide angle, stitching national anthems from different countries into a single Olympic song that crosses borders. Samsung wanted that to carry the Olympic spirit of "breaking down barriers," with different countries' anthems rising on the same field.
Samsung phones are, of course, hard to miss in the ad. According to Younghee Lee, Samsung's executive vice president of global marketing for mobile communications, breaking down geographic barriers and using technology to build borderless communication is also what the Samsung brand is after.
Watch the subtitles running under the video closely and you may notice that the country an anthem belongs to doesn't match what's on screen. Malaysia's anthem is sung by a girl in Paris; New Zealand's rings out in Britain. That mismatch is deliberate, another way of showing "no borders."
Samsung's Olympics campaign also called on a long roster of Olympic athletes, from the UK, France, the US, South Sudan, Australia, Brazil and elsewhere.
Gatorade: The Boy Who Learned to Fly
Agency: TBWA\Chiat\Day
No one fits Gatorade better than Usain Bolt, "the fastest man in the world" — the Gatorade logo already has a bolt of lightning in it.
The men's 100 meters is one of the most valuable and most watched events at the Games, and Bolt, who holds the world record in it, has said in interviews that he drinks Gatorade every day.
The ad is said to be based on Bolt's real childhood, and it spends a good stretch on how he was discovered almost by accident and ended up in track and field. But it doesn't stop there. The other big movement is about the pressure and fear inside a man who is always first: what if one day I'm not first anymore?
The film runs in chronological order, and a string of "running" shots links its two key stages of life — the young Bolt keeps running onto bigger stages and bigger tracks. Anyone who knows Bolt may catch one more detail: his favorite celebration pose shows up in the video more than once.
Details caught that well do a lot for an ad. Nike's The Last Game, made for the 2014 World Cup, is the most-watched soccer ad on YouTube, with 98,248,945 views and counting. That ad also became one of the classics of animated advertising for how well it rendered the players' personalities.
Lacoste: Support With Style
Agency: BETC & BETC Pop
Next to the two ads above, this one may be harder to read — there's barely a story — and aims instead to put across a mood through dance. "If choreography were an Olympic event, Lacoste's Rio ad would win gold," is how Adweek described it.
You can't miss the French tricolor and the Parisian touches all through the ad. The short was directed by the Paris artist I Could Never Be a Dancer, with music from the French electronic group The Shoes. The polo shirts, hoodies and trench coats worn by the troupe all come from Lacoste.
Lacoste is an official partner of the French Olympic Committee; the two signed a four-year deal in 2013 under which Lacoste dresses the entire French delegation. Sport is in this French brand's genes anyway — its founder, René Lacoste, was one of the "Four Musketeers" of the French national tennis team and a medalist at the 1924 Olympics.
Gillette: Perfect Isn't Pretty
Agency: Grey New York
Gillette, a men's shaving brand, has always been keen on sponsoring sport. Besides the Olympics, it is also a longtime sponsor of the La Liga giant Barcelona.
The Olympics ad Grey New York made for Gillette is textbook: not one expected element is missing. As creative work it plays things safe, but it is still a well-made ad.
The whole thing comes at competitive sport from its cruel side, using plenty of cool tones and even black-and-white footage to land the theme: perfect isn't pretty, but it's worth chasing. It features the Brazilian soccer star Neymar, the Chinese swimmer Ning Zetao, the British cyclist Andy Tennant and the American decathlete Ashton Eaton.
In the cross-cut storytelling you can more or less see what these athletes give up for their sport: time with their families, the fight against injuries the training brings, the pressure from the media and even from a whole country. To heighten the effect the ad reaches for some surreal touches — a burning goal frame in Neymar's nightmare, a wolfhound snarling after Ashton through the mist. The tone moves from calm into conflict, then eases back down.
We'd suggest watching this one alongside Under Armour's "RULE YOURSELF" for Phelps. If the two land differently, the music probably accounts for much of it.
Visa: Carpooling to Rio
Agency: BBDO
Next to the Gillette ad, Visa's Olympics spot is very "Rio." The short follows 15 athletes from around the world carpooling their way to the Rio Games, paying for things along the route with Visa Checkout.
How to put it? The whole thing feels like one big party in the forest. If the first ad we covered, Samsung's The Anthem, delivers a sacred kind of grandeur, this one is pure carnival.
You may also want the story behind it. Along with its 201 national and regional delegations, this year's Rio Olympics has a Refugee Olympic Team. Funding athletes who have qualified but are held back by outside conditions such as unrest at home is part of Visa's Olympic sponsorship work too.
Now you can see why they made an ad about athletes getting past every obstacle to "carpool" to Rio, even if it's told in a thoroughly cheerful way. This is also the 30th year of Visa's sponsorship of the Summer Olympics.
A Few More We Liked
The Olympics marketing battle is a long war. Over the past six months, in fact, brands have kept joining this summer's biggest fight.
QDaily has written about these Olympics ads before, and we liked them too.
Happy watching.
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.