Why Olympic Sponsorships Aren’t Effective

Chicago feels bad this week, having lost its bid to host the 2016 Olympics. After going to all the expense of making its best pitch, it stood back and watched as Rio stole the show. But some organizations that win their Olympic bids will feel even worse before the games are all over and done with: the marketers who pay dearly for sponsorship rights only to see “ambushers” capture customers’ attention.

Ambushing, in the marketing lexicon, means taking advantage of an assembly of customers you didn’t pay to create or support. At its simplest, it’s a tactic as old as bi-planes pulling banners past crowded beaches. But with the growth of public events — and corporate event sponsorships — it has taken on new levels of sophistication and audacity. Some ambushes deserve a grudging admiration, like the ones Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff describes in his forthcoming book Behind the Cloud. When his upstart software company staged a publicity stunt outside Seibel’s big user conference, it not only got its message out, it also damaged its archrival’s marketing effort.

Should Olympic sponsors have to stand for such raids? The International Olympics Committee and Organizing Committees are at pains to assure them they should not. Given the exorbitant expense involved (McDonald’s, for example, pays in excess of $900 million for the association, and total 2014 sponsorships are expected to exceed $1 billion), the Olympics deploys an army of lawyers to nail violators and ensure that benefits accrue exclusively to sponsors. They muscle nations into enacting draconian laws about what constitutes Olympic IP and what constitutes too-close proximity for competitive marketing.

That’s a misplaced priority, however, for two reasons. First, the exclusivity the Olympics tries to ensure is unattainable, and second, focusing so relentlessly on it takes marketers’ eyes off the efforts that will really make their sponsorship pay off.

It’s just not true that the IOC and Organising Committees have a lock on the value of the Olympics and the power to award it exclusively. They may own the Olympic games, but they don’t own the Olympic experience. They may own the Torch Relay, but it’s the fans who turn it from a long, lonely run into a rolling demonstration of pride and anticipation. The Olympics spirit is really owned by the fans, and any marketer can tap into it at some level.

So as much as Olympics officials talk about drawing a line in the sand against ambush, all they can really hope to do is protect their own sandcastle. It’s a fabulous sandcastle, no question. But it sits on an awfully big beach.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the Olympics trademarks should not be protected; certainly they should. But the Olympics does its sponsors a disservice if it encourages them to think that legal enforcement is all that’s required for a rewarding sponsorship experience. When sponsors adopt that blinkered view, they concentrate on the rights they’ve bought, and stop thinking broadly of the opportunity they have. They invest in certain activities because they’re entitled to, and neglect to do other things, because anyone’s allowed to. That means plastering the Games while leaving the experience up for grabs. And that’s just asking for an ambush.

I’m neither for nor against ambush marketing, but if I had to choose, I’d rather do it (legally and strategically) than have it done to me. Of course, the best choice would be to leverage a sponsorship so fully that there was no room left for effective ambush. So that’s the better priority for the Olympics efforts for sponsors: to help them leverage their opportunity to the point that ambushers are marginalized. In practice, that would mean that the Olympics provided more education around certain key points:

• Ambushing is primarily a marketing challenge, not a legal problem. Why is it only Olympics lawyers who are talking to sponsors about ambushers’ tactics? Sponsors need a creative process and practical approach for leveraging the Olympic experience more broadly themselves.
• Big prizes aren’t the way to win hearts. Something about the Olympics medals seems to inspire big prize giveaways — but those prizes are meaningful only to the people who win them. The better approach is to create small, meaningful rewards for thousands or millions of people.
• Self-congratulatory messages don’t sell. Sponsors should not be encouraged to trumpet their noble support of the Olympics. It may be a temptation given how big a check they have written, but it’s not a marketing message.
• Compliance is not all the Olympics movement cares about. For every sponsor, an Olympics Organizing Committee provides an “account manager” to manage the relationship and ensure the sponsor’s activities conform to contract obligations and rights. Given the mountains of administrivia involved, that’s a necessary role, but hardly a sufficient one. The Olympics should also have high-level strategists working early with teams on leverage and measurement planning. Their job within the Olympics organization would be to draw new levels of creativity and fan engagement out of sponsors’ efforts.
• Every sponsorship can be different. A former Olympic sponsor I know described the experience as “trying to do gymnastics in a straitjacket.” He wanted to do so much with the investment, but met resistance at every turn until he eventually just gave up and ran the same kind of promotion as all the other sponsors.

Sponsors need to be able to jump into the crowds, nurture fan-generated content, and engage outside the bounds of the Olympics themselves, where so much of the real action is. And like it or not, to do that, the Olympics needs to be prepared to provide sponsor benefits, including IP, that they will lose control of out there in the wild ether of the Olympic experience.

Kim Skildum-Reid is a Sydney-based corporate sponsorship strategist, co-author of industry bestsellers, The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit and The Sponsor’s Toolkit, and author of The Ambush Marketing Toolkit. For more on Kim and her company, Power Sponsorship, visit powersponsorship.com.