Traditionally, following the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, advertisers have an opportunity to catch their breath from the weeks-long slog of marketing, knowing they won’t have to revisit another Olympics for the next two years or so.

But thanks to COVID-19, that’s not the case with this Olympic cycle; the opening ceremony of Beijing 2022 is less than six months away—the shortest gap between a Summer and Winter Games since the 1980s—leaving advertisers with precious little time to asses the lessons learned from Tokyo.  

Viewership for the Summer Games got off to a rocky start, with the opening ceremony hitting a three-decade low and forcing NBCUniversal, which airs the games, to quickly start conversations with advertisers around make-goods.

By the end of the Games, NBCU saw an average of just over 15 million primetime viewers on linear TV, making Tokyo the least-watched Olympics since NBC started carrying the games in 1988. When accounting for viewing that took place on NBC's digital and streaming properties, that numbers increases to 15.5 million, which is still down 40% from the 2016 Rio Games. 

"With more than 120 billion minutes of engagement across all NBCU properties for the Tokyo Olympics, all our advertisers were made whole for Tokyo Olympics advertising," a company spokeswoman said in an email. 

The ratings decline follows a trend seen in other major tent-pole events over the past year, with live TV spectacles like the Oscars, Golden Globes and even the Super Bowl, seeing meaningful ratings declines. 

Gold, silver and bronze lining 

But while the pandemic-era games that wrapped on Sunday drew roughly half the average viewership that the Summer Olympics in London did less than a decade ago, Tokyo 2020 was not without its silver linings.

A digital viewership surge (which surely accounted for at least a portion of the linear TV decline) handed NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service its best two weeks since it launched last year, with nearly 6 billion minutes of coverage streamed on NBCU’s platforms by U.S. viewers.

Peacock's equity among U.S. consumers increased from 56.3 in the weeks leading up to the Games, to 62.3 after the Games began, according to the Harris Brand Platform. It also saw significant lifts in purchase consideration and momentum, according to the survey. 

“I think we were all a little disappointed in terms of average audiences but our goal was to deliver on our client investments within the games,” says Jeremy Carey, managing director at Omnicom-owned sports marketing agency Optimum Sports. Carey believes this objective was fulfilled. 

“We are making sure that everything is kept in perspective in regards to what Tokyo delivered based on what was purchased,” he says, noting that the Olympics, no matter how they’re staged or viewed, offer a tremendously strong value proposition for advertisers, with family-friendly content in a brand-safe environment that millions of people engage with, not just for an hour, but for weeks at a time.

Among viewers of this year's Olympic Games, 51% of U.S. adults recalled seeing an ad from a specific brand during the game, while 78% were able to identify brands that advertised, according to Harris Poll survey. Coca-Cola and Nike were the most identified advertisers, with 48% and 40% of respondents identifying them.

Overall, the ads that performed the best across segments focused on family, teamwork and American patriotism, the survey found. 

That value proposition comes at a premium, though; while not quite as expensive as a Super Bowl buy, a 30-second commercial during the Olympics could cost as much as $1 million, the New York Times reports.

Eyes on Beijing

With the hiccups and price tag of the games still fresh in advertisers’ minds, it’s now all eyes on Beijing—which arguably has more unknown variables than its recent Tokyo counterpart had—leaving marketers to hold their breath amid what many have described as a hope-for-the-best, prepare-for-the-worst scenario.

“Advertisers, they want the Olympics to work; they want to believe it’s going to draw in those large audiences. Advertisers are willing to, in many cases, look at this as an exception, but also have that doubt in the back of their minds,” Fred Chasse, senior VP with data consulting firm Analytic Partners, says of the Tokyo Games.

From his perspective, many of the “commonalities” that hampered the Tokyo Games may still be in play for Beijing 2022, but there’s another hypothesis unrelated to the pandemic that, if proven, would likely keep many marketers and TV executives awake at night.

“One of the things that’s a little bit worrisome if this becomes a case of viewers losing interest in the games overall. If COVID is being blamed for lower ratings, well, COVID’s still going to be here in six months,” Chasse says. “It’s going to look really, really bad for NBC if you have back-to-back games that don’t deliver.”

The ratings downswing may be due to a combination of an unusual Olympic schedule as well as the wider audience shift away from linear TV, which has been a factor in broadcast viewership since long before these Olympics, according to one media buyer. 

The buyer pointed to pro-sports leagues, which saw an upswing in viewership when teams returned to a normal competition schedule and welcomed back fans to their stadiums, but that viewership was still often times below where it was pre-pandemic. 

Perhaps a bigger challenge than holding the Olympics in an odd-numbered year or the lack of fans in the stands, which appears to have more negligible impact on Tokyo’s ratings than it did for the National Basketball Association or National Football League, is the sheer distance between the U.S. and East Asia.

“Anytime the games are in a country that has such a vast time difference, it’s a challenge. You either have to get up at 3 a.m. to watch your USA Soccer, or you’re watching it in primetime where you may already know the outcome,” says Mary Scott, president of global integrated communications at United Entertainment Group, a sports marketing agency.

With Beijing being 12 hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast (just barely less than Tokyo’s 13-hour time difference), Scott believes that the timing of events only exacerbates the “very complicated landscape” surrounding next year’s Winter Games, dogged by a myriad of geopolitical and practical issues.

“From a broadcast standpoint, NBC struggled to find the right mix of what was acceptable via live versus recorded coverage as they worked through the challenge of time zone,” adds Optimum’s Carey, adding that such scheduling difficulties “led to a lot of viewer confusion.”

“This will all need to be addressed and it will need to be addressed quickly for Beijing,” he says.

But even assuming the best with COVID-19 and viewers’ interest in the games, Beijing 2022 has another unique obstacle to contend with: long-standing calls for a boycott by those who point to China’s threats to Taiwan and Tibet, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong and brutal treatment of Uyghur Muslims in its far west Xinjiang region.

It wouldn’t be totally unprecedented, with boycotts of the Games taking place amid the Cold War, but to date, more than 180 human rights groups have suggested that the U.S. and its allies sitting out would send a powerful message to China.

“At this stage, I don’t think the pressure is being dialed up enough to really ramp up the anxiety levels,” says Chasse, who hasn’t been hearing much concern from his client brands about a potential boycott of the event. But he emphasizes that anything is possible before February 4, when the Beijing Games are slated to open.

The idea of a boycott has also seemingly resonated with America’s neighbors to the north, thanks in part to a diplomatic feud between Canada and China that has been ongoing since the former arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on U.S. fraud charges in 2018; days later, China retaliated by imprisoning two Canadian citizens.

Recent polling by Ontario-based firm Nanos shows that a majority of Canadians may back such a boycott of the upcoming Winter Games, with 45% and 19% of those surveyed saying they either fully support or somewhat support a boycott, respectively.

Many advertisers may be keen to move past this tumultuous Olympic cycle and set their sights on the stability of the following three games: Paris in 2024, Milan and the Alpine town of Cortina d’Ampezzo in 2026, and Los Angeles in 2028— three Western markets that luckily aren’t too many time zones away.