After two muted Olympics, the Paris Games brought back large audiences and plenty of buzzy cultural conversation. They also highlight the different world marketers are navigating to keep up with audiences consuming content across multiple platforms and being barraged by advertising on each of them.

From the opening ceremony on July 26 through Tuesday’s coverage, the Paris Olympics have drawn an average of 32.2 million daily viewers, a 77% increase over the Tokyo Olympics that aired in the summer of 2021. In streaming, viewership on Peacock has surpassed the combined total of all previously streamed Summer and Winter Olympics at 17 billion minutes as of Tuesday, regularly pulling between 4 million and 6 million viewers per day.

Despite “the trials and tribulations that were the last few Games, they’ve demonstrated their ability to bounce back,” said Jeremy Carey, chief investment officer at Optimum Sports. “Everything around Paris has been incredibly smooth, and our clients are happy.”

This is a far cry from past Olympics, when advertisers were seeking make-goods for audience under-delivery. NBCU has pulled out all the stops to make sure Paris was a return to form for the Games. It has featured celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart and influencer Alex Cooper in coverage and developed an extensive influencer network to attract Gen Z audiences. Popularity was also boosted by the Olympics’ inclusion of younger-skewing events such as skateboarding and breakdancing.

According to Carey, the rapid evolution of technology and media consumption since the last Summer Games means historical comparisons will be hard to draw for this year’s marketing performance. Instead, marketers and agencies will be looking at lessons from this year’s Olympics to better strategize around cultural events as media continues to transition to meet future consumer habits.

Purposeful marketing

The Olympics is among increasingly rare TV properties with the ability to aggregate large audiences.

Consultancy giant Deloitte is combining a long-term partnership with the International Olympic Committee and an Olympic marketing campaign to contextualize B2B services for consumers. Deloitte struck a 10-year partnership with the IOC two years ago to offer services in business management, digital strategy and supporting initiatives in sustainability, diversity, equity and inclusion and mental health. Deloitte is also featuring a campaign that tracks first-time achievements in the Olympics.

The partnership “extends beyond marketing, but it means the marketing that we’re doing has so much more depth and emotion because we’ve selected each other as partners based on shared goals and values,” said Suzanne Kounkel, chief marketing officer at Deloitte. “The Olympics is a way to humanize the work we do in a way that is very approachable that may not be in another environment.”

Kounkel said the lesson extends to brands that may not have the budget or infrastructure for setting up large-scale partnerships with an organization or media company. Rather, the more important strategy is to find content or advertising channels that match the brand’s message and audience. For example, Kounkel said Deloitte chose to advertise in this year’s WNBA finals rather than the Super Bowl because the WNBA audience was more meaningful to its work in DE&I despite a smaller reach.

Similarly, Delta’s head of brand marketing, Emmakate Young, said the Olympics was an ideal event for a large partnership investment because it meets the airline’s goals of reaching new and existing consumers, as well as being able to integrate its travel branding with broader stories and lifestyle content in partnership with Team USA.

“The core advice is to know your brand, know who your audience is … then find a property that your creative is going to resonate to that audience, instead of trying to be in a million different places,” said Young.

The Paris Games kicked off as Delta was the subject of negative publicity related to the airline’s mass cancellations and delays as a result of a software outage. Young said the situation has not impacted Delta’s Olympic marketing rollout or reception.

Marketing beyond the spot

In addition to more traditional commercials, Delta sponsored a medal counter on Peacock and an ad-free hour of the opening ceremony and has created a social series featuring Team USA athletes. Delta also worked with NBCU to create custom content before the Games began, featuring its sponsored athletes in “Top Chef” and on the “Today” show as well as a spot mixing athletes with talent from Peacock’s “The Traitors.”

This year’s Olympics featured more advertisers than any previous games, with NBCU estimating approximately 250 advertisers participating compared to 100 in prior years. Much of that is due to first-time Olympic advertisers buying ad space in the Games programmatically, which wasn’t available in previous years. This made broader sponsorships and integrations into the broadcast more important than ever for partners of the IOC or Team USA.

But more than just making a brand more visible, finding unique sponsorship opportunities in any wide-reaching event “helps with having a deeper connection with audiences, because they see you as more than just an advertiser,” said Young.

For Delta, Young said that while its ad spots reinforce the airline’s traditional messaging, its additional sponsorships “shows us as transcending one category and really being more of a lifestyle brand … it’s about driving deeper resonance with our audiences and also resonating with new audiences like Gen Z.”

The overall goal is that “when you watch the Olympics, you see Delta,” said Young. Similarly, Kounkel said Deloitte’s broader partnership with the IOC “moves from a one-dimensional or two-dimensional world into a three-dimensional world.”

Airing ads isn’t just the price of entry for accessing larger sponsorships with media companies. “The actual marketing and commercials we play have depth and resonance that we don’t believe would if we were just running ads,” said Kounkel.

Cross-platform consumption

The media landscape has evolved significantly since the previous Summer Olympics in Tokyo, much less the 2016 Rio Olympics. NBCU’s coverage for the Paris Games has tapped into the modern media consumption brands need to reach large, diverse audiences. The media company created unique viewing experiences and branding opportunities across linear TV, streaming, social and influencer channels.

“What has really been exciting for us is the diversity across platforms,” said Delta’s Young. The Olympic marketing “is not just a campaign that’s running during the broadcast and on digital; it is custom integrations across a wide variety of platforms that are bringing us to new audiences.”

Young said it’s important for marketers to consider the different audiences they might be reaching on each platform and strategize for them. For example, Young said Delta “wants the tailored, smaller audiences [in streaming], and we also want to have the expansive coverage of broadcast.”

In streaming, Young said it’s been meaningful to be able to target audiences in a more tailored way, such as Gen Z, women and viewers watching on TV and their phones at the same time, in contrast to the broad messaging featured in its linear marketing.

More: Gen Z’s niche communities—how brands can forge relationships

“How we look at the Olympics in the grand scheme of sports is a lot different—the audience is a lot different, the sports in themselves are not tier-one sports for the most part,” said Optimum Sports’ Carey. “This is the pinnacle of so many of these events … all these niche fans then become Olympic fans.”

The shift to Peacock also highlights the speed of conversation and growing force of fandom as the desire to be up to date on cultural conversation happening rapidly on social media drives viewers to live streams rather than waiting for primetime highlights.

Carey said this year’s Olympics have highlighted multiple developments in current evolutions in media. The first is advertisers working in tandem with NBCU as it “utilizes the games to really change user habits—they’re trying to transition their business to get content consumption across the digital environment, and they’ve been incredibly successful.”

Compared to the Tokyo and Rio Olympics, “the world is just different,” said Dani Benowitz, global and U.S. president at Magna, pointing to digital platforms such as TikTok and Peacock, which weren’t as popular or didn’t exist during prior Games and have now become important marketing channels. Benowitz said the key to modern media strategies isn’t “breaking it up into sections,” but evaluating the total audience an advertiser is reaching in the Games.

The streaming audience for the Olympics is a fraction of its overall viewership, but those audiences are also viewing differently. NBCU has advertised its Peacock coverage of the Paris Games not as a substitute for its linear broadcasts that cord-cutters might not have access to but as the platform for those looking to see all events in real time, while NBC’s coverage largely packages highlights. Benowitz also pointed to the difference in audience, with streaming tending to skew younger and linear typically attracting an older audience or families.

Outside of TV and streaming coverage, NBCU also coordinated an expansive creator and social ecosystem for advertisers, featuring partnerships with more than two dozen influencers as well as platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Meta.

“If [a brand] is truly surrounding the Olympics and activating wherever there’s Olympics content or conversation, they’re going to see the rewards,” said Benowitz. She said that the benefit of advertisers partnering holistically in the Games rather than picking out certain platforms is that it creates a domino effect, leading viewers from one platform to another to chase the cultural conversation happening across them.

This is an example of the new era of sports marketing, in which marketers are balancing the capabilities and audiences of streaming platforms that have acquired sports versus traditional linear broadcasts, she said.

Sustaining momentum

Given the strength of this year’s Olympics, “we’re going to capture this wave of performance success and try and maintain that as much as we possibly can in terms of carrying forward on it,” said Optimum’s Carey. 

Sustaining the momentum of brand’s Olympic investments is especially important as marketers keep close watch over budgets given economic uncertainty. In many cases, this means brands working closely with athletes to keep their profiles high between now and the next Games they compete in, said Carey, noting this is also cost-efficient for marketers so they “don’t have to start over in four years [for the Summer Olympics] or two [for the Winter Olympics].”

Conversely, Deloitte’s Kounkel said that it was important in planning the company’s Olympic marketing to make sure it fits within larger marketing strategies so that the Games propel broader messaging.

“We want to make our people proud and our clients loyal, and we have one- to three-year goals on what that looks like,” said Kounkel. “We break those down into the specific opportunities we have and what those channels allow us to do.”

For Deloitte’s Olympics and WNBA marketing, “the tone and specific message was slightly different, but we have similar components to the messaging we’re doing … we have our messages and then we’re amplifying them in the context of the audience.”