Olympic Advertising: What Most Brands Get Wrong

Olympic advertising is one of the most expensive, highest-stakes media decisions a brand can make. Done well, it builds awareness at a scale few other platforms can match. Done poorly, it burns through budget on impressions that generate no lasting commercial return. The difference between the two has less to do with creative quality than most marketers assume.

Most brands that invest in Olympic sponsorship or advertising treat the Games as a branding event. The ones that extract real value treat it as a growth problem.

Why Olympic Advertising Is a Different Beast

The Olympics are not a normal media buy. The audience is vast, the emotional context is unusually high, and the competitive clutter is intense. Every major advertiser in your category is likely running something. Attention is shared across dozens of storylines, sports, and national narratives simultaneously.

What makes it different is not the scale. It’s the emotional permission. Audiences watching the Games are in a state of genuine engagement. They’re not scrolling. They’re watching. That creates a window for brand communication that most media environments don’t offer. The question is whether your creative and your strategy are built to use that window properly.

I spent years managing large media budgets across multiple industries, and the pattern I saw repeatedly was brands spending heavily on high-profile moments without a coherent theory of how that spend would translate into growth. The Olympics amplified that problem. The emotional stakes made it feel like the advertising was working, even when the commercial outcomes were unclear.

If you’re thinking about how Olympic advertising fits into a broader go-to-market approach, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial frameworks that make high-investment moments like this actually pay off.

The Reach Problem Most Brands Ignore

There’s a version of Olympic advertising that is essentially expensive preaching to the choir. The brand already has strong awareness in its category. It runs a well-produced spot during the Games. The existing customer base sees it, feels good about the brand they already buy, and the sales numbers look fine in the weeks that follow. The marketing team reports success.

But what actually happened? In most cases, the brand captured intent that already existed. The people who bought after seeing the ad were likely going to buy anyway. The campaign reinforced preference among a group that didn’t need reinforcing. That’s not growth. That’s expensive retention dressed up as acquisition.

Earlier in my career I was guilty of overvaluing this kind of outcome. I put too much weight on lower-funnel signals and not enough on whether we were reaching people who had never seriously considered the brand before. The shift in thinking that changed how I approached media planning was simple: the clothes shop analogy. Someone who has already tried something on is far more likely to buy it. The question is whether your advertising is getting new people through the door for the first time, or just reminding people who are already in the shop that they like the clothes.

Olympic advertising, at its best, is a door-opening exercise at enormous scale. The Games bring in audiences who don’t watch much television, don’t engage with your category content, and wouldn’t normally encounter your brand in their usual media diet. That’s the opportunity. But only if your targeting strategy is built around reaching those people, not just maximising impressions among your existing base.

This is one of the core tensions in market penetration strategy: the instinct to spend where you already have traction, because measurement is easier, versus spending where you have the most headroom to grow, because the audience is genuinely new.

Sponsorship vs. Media Spend: Two Different Decisions

One of the most common structural errors I see in Olympic marketing is treating sponsorship and media spend as a single integrated decision when they are actually two separate strategic choices that require different justifications.

Official Olympic sponsorship, at the TOP programme level, is a multi-year, multi-hundred-million-dollar commitment. It buys category exclusivity, rights to use Olympic marks, access to athlete imagery, and association with the Games at the highest level. It is a brand platform decision. The commercial case for it rests on long-term brand equity, not short-term sales movement.

Media spend during the Games is a different decision entirely. A brand that has no official sponsorship relationship can still run advertising during Olympic broadcasts, target audiences watching the Games digitally, and build campaigns that ride the cultural moment without paying for official rights. The commercial case for this is more straightforward and more measurable.

Where brands go wrong is conflating the two. They buy a sponsorship and assume the media spend will follow naturally. Or they run media during the Games without a clear brand platform to anchor it to. The sponsorship becomes a badge without a strategy. The media spend becomes noise without a brand story.

When I was running agencies, I’d see this pattern in pitches. A client would come in with a sponsorship deal already signed, looking for a creative campaign to justify it. The sponsorship decision had been made at board level, often for reasons that had more to do with hospitality and executive relationships than marketing strategy. The agency was being asked to build a commercial case backwards. That’s a difficult brief to answer honestly.

What the Best Olympic Campaigns Actually Do

The Olympic campaigns that generate genuine commercial return share a few structural characteristics that have nothing to do with production quality or budget size.

First, they have a clear audience hypothesis. Not “we want to reach everyone watching the Games” but “we want to reach 25-to-40-year-olds who are currently buying from our main competitor and have a specific reason to consider switching.” That level of specificity shapes everything: the message, the media placement, the creative tone, and the measurement framework.

Second, they connect the emotional moment to a commercial mechanism. The Games create an emotional halo. Viewers feel pride, inspiration, and genuine connection. The brands that convert that into commercial outcomes are the ones that give audiences something to do with that feeling. A product that is relevant to the sporting context. A promotion that is time-limited to the Games period. A content series that extends the story beyond the broadcast window. Without a mechanism, the emotional lift dissipates the moment the closing ceremony ends.

Third, they plan the full funnel before the campaign launches. This sounds obvious, but the number of Olympic campaigns I’ve seen that had no coherent plan for what happened after the awareness spike is remarkable. Traffic goes up. Search volume increases. And then there’s nothing waiting for that audience when they arrive. No landing experience built for the moment. No retargeting strategy for people who engaged but didn’t convert. No CRM sequence for people who signed up during the Games period. The top of the funnel was built. Everything below it was an afterthought.

Understanding how to connect high-reach brand moments to downstream commercial outcomes is part of what makes go-to-market execution feel harder than it should. The media environment has fragmented, but the underlying commercial logic hasn’t changed: reach without conversion architecture is expensive awareness with no return.

The Measurement Trap

Olympic advertising has a measurement problem that most post-campaign reports don’t acknowledge honestly.

The Games generate a cultural moment that affects consumer behaviour in ways that are genuinely difficult to isolate. Sales go up during and after the Games for brands that advertised heavily. But sales also go up for brands in adjacent categories that didn’t advertise at all. Consumer sentiment shifts during major national events. Retail behaviour changes. The baseline is moving, and attributing post-campaign sales lift to the campaign itself requires more rigour than most measurement frameworks provide.

I’ve judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically designed to evaluate marketing effectiveness rather than creative quality. The submissions that stand up to scrutiny are the ones that acknowledge what they can’t prove as clearly as they present what they can. The ones that don’t hold up are usually built on attribution logic that would collapse under cross-examination: a sales spike that could be explained by distribution changes, a competitor going dark, a PR moment that happened to coincide with the campaign, or simply the natural demand cycle of the category.

The honest version of Olympic advertising measurement looks like this: you establish a baseline, you model what sales would have looked like without the campaign, and you compare. You use control markets where possible. You track brand metrics longitudinally, not just in the immediate post-campaign window. And you resist the temptation to claim credit for every positive commercial outcome that followed the campaign.

Analytics tools give you a perspective on what happened. They don’t give you the full picture. The discipline is in knowing the difference.

Which Brands Should Actually Invest in Olympic Advertising

Not every brand has a legitimate case for Olympic advertising. The honest question is whether the investment is the right use of budget given the brand’s current position, growth objectives, and the alternatives available.

Brands that have the strongest case for Olympic investment share a few characteristics. They have genuine mass-market relevance, meaning the audience watching the Games is actually their audience, not an aspirational one. They have the brand equity and category presence to benefit from association with the Games’ values, rather than being dwarfed by the context. And they have the downstream infrastructure to convert awareness into commercial outcomes, meaning the investment doesn’t stop at the media buy.

Brands that have a weaker case are those with highly specific target audiences that don’t map well to the Games’ broad viewership, those in categories where the emotional connection to sport is forced rather than natural, and those that are still building fundamental brand awareness in their core market. If your brand awareness among your primary target audience is still low, the Olympics is probably not where you should be spending. The reach is enormous, but so is the cost per relevant impression.

There’s also a category of brand that benefits from the cultural moment without needing to pay for official association. Challenger brands, in particular, have found ways to run compelling campaigns during Olympic periods that ride the emotional energy of the Games without the cost of sponsorship. The creative challenge is higher, because you can’t use the rings or official athlete imagery, but the commercial logic can be sound if the targeting and the message are right.

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy makes a point that applies directly here: the right channel decision depends on where your target audience is in their decision experience, not on where the largest audience happens to be. Olympic advertising puts you in front of a very large audience. Whether that audience is the right audience at the right moment is a separate question.

The Creative Brief That Actually Works

Early in my career I was in a brainstorm for a major brand. The founder handed me the whiteboard pen and left for a client meeting. The room looked at me. I had no particular authority in that moment, but I had a point of view, and that turned out to be enough. The brief we were working from was too broad. It was asking the creative team to do everything at once: build awareness, drive consideration, communicate product benefits, and land an emotional story. The result was work that tried to do all of those things and succeeded at none of them.

Olympic advertising briefs have the same problem at scale. The emotional context is so rich that it invites creative teams to reach for everything. The result is often a beautifully produced piece of content that communicates nothing specific about the brand and generates no commercial outcome beyond a few days of positive social sentiment.

A brief that works for Olympic advertising has a single clear job. Not “build brand love and drive consideration and communicate our values and show product in use.” One job. Either you are reaching new audiences who have never seriously considered the brand, in which case the job is to make the brand memorable and relevant to their lives. Or you are converting existing awareness into consideration among people who know you but haven’t bought, in which case the job is to give them a reason to act. Those are different briefs. They require different creative strategies, different media placements, and different success metrics.

The discipline of choosing one job and holding to it is harder than it sounds when the budget is large and the stakeholder list is long. Everyone wants their priority reflected in the campaign. The creative ends up carrying too many messages. The audience receives none of them clearly.

What Happens After the Flame Goes Out

The Games last three weeks. The commercial value of Olympic advertising, if it’s been built correctly, should last considerably longer.

Brands that extract long-term value from Olympic investment do so by treating the Games as a launchpad rather than an event. The awareness and emotional association built during the Games is the raw material. What you build with it in the months that follow determines whether the investment was worth making.

This means having a content and communications plan that extends the brand story beyond the broadcast window. It means using the data generated during the Games period, search behaviour, site traffic, social engagement, to inform the targeting and messaging of subsequent campaigns. It means connecting the emotional narrative of the Games to the specific commercial offers and product stories that will drive actual purchase behaviour in the following months.

The brands that fail to do this are left with a spike in brand metrics that fades within six to eight weeks and a media spend that looks impressive in a presentation but generates no lasting commercial advantage. The Games gave them a moment. They didn’t know what to do with it.

Building the kind of commercial infrastructure that converts high-reach moments into sustained growth is exactly the challenge that growth strategy is designed to address. The media investment is the easy part. The harder work is building the system that makes it pay off over time.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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