The Paris Olympics are a month away and the brand campaigns are starting to leak. And I am already fascinated by the impossible tightrope every global sponsor is trying to walk: be patriotic enough to activate locally, global enough to not alienate international markets, and culturally sensitive enough to avoid the inevitable controversy that comes with any large-scale international event in 2024.
And I am already fascinated by the impossible tightrope every global sponsor is trying to walk: be patriotic enough to activate locally, global enough to not alienate international markets, and culturally sensitive enough to avoid the inevitable controversy that comes with any large-scale international event in 2024.
The Olympics used to be simple for brands.
Ocean Spray didn't pay Nathan Apodaca to skateboard while drinking cranberry juice. They didn't plan it. They couldn't have. The 'campaign' that generated 15 billion views cost them $0 in media spend.
In the before times, Olympic brand strategy was straightforward: pick an inspiring athlete, film them training at dawn, add a soaring orchestral score, and run it during primetime. Maybe throw in some national flag imagery. Maybe a tagline about pushing limits. Simple. Effective. Uncontroversial.
That playbook is dead, and here is why.
First, the audience is fragmented. Nobody is watching the Olympics the same way anymore. Some people are streaming specific events. Some are following on TikTok highlights. Some are only engaging through memes and cultural commentary. The idea of one big campaign reaching everyone during a shared primetime moment is fantasy.
Second, nationalism is complicated now. Waving a flag in an ad used to be feel-good patriotism. Now it is a political statement that half your audience will love and half will side-eye, depending on what else is happening politically in that country. In an election year, national pride imagery reads differently.
Third, the athletes themselves have more power and more opinions. They have platforms. They use them. And brands that sponsor athletes who decide to make political statements during the Games will need to respond in real time to situations they cannot predict or control.
The strategic opportunity:
The brands that will win Paris 2024 are the ones that find universal human truths rather than national ones. The nervousness before competition. The heartbreak of near-misses. The joy of unexpected victories. The weird specificity of niche Olympic sports that nobody follows except during the Games.
There is so much white space in celebrating the absurd beauty of the Olympics without wrapping it in a flag. The breakdancing is new this year. Skateboarding is back. These are sports with inherently global, youth-driven, internet-native cultures that resist traditional nationalist framing. The brands smart enough to lean into that energy will find audiences that are hungry for Olympics content that does not feel like a political ad.
My prediction for the biggest brand moment:
It will not come from a planned campaign. It will come from a brand that reacts to a genuine, unscripted Olympic moment faster than anyone else. The real-time play. The contextual social post. The Oreo-during-the-Super-Bowl-blackout equivalent.
The Olympics reward speed and cultural fluency over production value. And the brands with the organizational agility to move in real time will get more value from one well-timed post than from a million-dollar anthem spot.
I will be watching from my couch. Probably at 3 AM because time zones. Definitely judging the brand activations. My cats will be asleep and therefore unable to appreciate my commentary.