The Marketing Olympics: How brands will show up in the Summer 2024 games
The 2024 Olympics are here, a sporting event truly like none other. Over 16 days of competition, 10,500 athletes representing 206 nations will participate in 329 medal events across 32 different sports. Fans can stream every sport live, watch replays at their convenience, keep up with medal counts, see behind-the-scenes content, and virtually never miss a moment. This year’s Paris Olympics will be available for fans to watch exclusively through NBCUniversal (NBCU) and provides ample opportunities for advertisers to reach highly engaged audiences under NBCU’s new Olympic offerings and more.
Olympic fans, the gold medal audience
Marketers are drawn to sports for their competitive nature, which draws highly engaged audiences to screens. The appeal of live sports is familiar to marketers, but the Olympics offers a viewership scale unlike other large sporting events. Compared to The Super Bowl, the Olympic Games are spread across 16 days and feature an array of sports and athletes. This year, 1.5 billion people from around the world are expected to tune in with hopes of seeing record-breaking performances from superstar athletes or the triumphant underdog overcome the odds.
The Olympics also offer advertisers the opportunity to tap into the rising popularity of women’s sports. Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, and the USA women’s basketball team are among the headlining female talent competing in Paris this year and will likely be big players in boosting viewership of the games. These female headliners have already drawn fans to screens as 488 million live minutes were streamed during the U.S. Olympic Trials, three times the total minutes streamed during the 2021 and 2016 Trials combined. The Trials are just a taste of how many viewers are expected to watch the games this year.
The Olympics under NBCU’s care
2024 is NBCU’s second Olympics under their media rights agreement, giving them exclusive coverage of the games through 2032. To view Olympic content, fans can watch via their respective television packages, but NBCU also offers fans the opportunity to customize their viewing experience while streaming on Peacock. With a new user interface for the games and streaming coverage of the 5,000 hours of sports, fans will have more access than ever. From live-action streaming during the day to highlights and human-interest stories during primetime, this experience caters to any viewer. Peacock will also have an Olympic-specific channel called “The Gold Zone,” mirroring the NFL’s “RedZone” coverage of games. The Gold Zone will bounce around live events and provide coverage of up to 40 simultaneous events daily from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. (EST).
In addition to “The Gold Zone,” NBC is introducing a set of programming blocks called “Prime Pods” that feature limited commercial inventory hosted by one lone sponsor. While the Prime Pods inventory sold out almost immediately to big sponsors, that doesn’t mean small and medium-sized advertisers can’t align with Olympics content. For the first time in Olympic history, NBCU is offering programmatic inventory in partnership with The Trade Desk.
Live sports and real-time bidding
As viewers tune in, marketers are planning to take advantage of the anticipated events. Many brands have already locked down their linear television buys months in advance and huge brands that are frequent Olympic partners like Coca-Cola and VISA will have exclusive category-level activations.
However, with a portion of Olympics ad inventory running on Peacock and the NBC Sports app, both live events and replays are fair game to advertisers of all sizes thanks to programmatic buying.
NBCU is partnering with The Trade Desk demand side platform to allow brands to bid on special private marketplace deals to run video spots throughout both the Olympic games and Paralympics. NBCU opening Olympic inventory to programmatic buying is a first, marking a win for brands of all sizes. The appeal to brands is the omission of minimum spends, allowing a wide swath of advertisers with video creative to be able to show up within the Olympic games.
In addition to advertising alongside the games, brands can appear around the event as well. This could include running video spots in game highlight content through NBCU, or working with data partners to target users who have been watching various Olympic events. This level of opportunity for brands of all sizes was simply not available in previous Olympic games. The advancements in programmatic technology and inventory connections have continued to improve, allowing space for brand variety in high viewership events like the Olympics.
What this means for marketers
Coverage of the Paris Olympics under NBCU will be the first time viewers can stream every medal event. This pivot from linear TV grants advertisers unique opportunities to get in front of a large audience. As live sports continue to move to streaming services, these 2024 games will highlight future opportunities that advertisers will have to connect with fans during such Olympic-sized events. Whether your brand is advertising in or around the 2024 Olympics or not, the changes in how the Olympics are being broadcast and viewed this year is a sign of big changes to come in how all brands buy television ads. As streaming takes more and more viewership, even the biggest of live sport tentpole events, marketers will need to reach their audience in different ways – whether it be via traditional television or streaming, with digital buying platforms becoming an even greater mechanism for securing ad inventory in the future.
