Beijing London Chicago Olympic Bid News And Commentary

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To sponsor the Olympics, via International Olympic Committee (IOC) sponsor opportunities, would be a bargain in today’s money IF the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) sponsor fee(s) were, say, $3 million, $5 million, $8 million, or maybe even US $21 million. But in reality 12 official Olympics sponsors together paid more like $860 million to sponsor the most recent Olympics, Beijing’s 2008 Olympics included.

Even after that combined fee approaching US $1 billion gets divvied up between the Olympic sponsors it is clear that, increasingly, such high-powered companies are regarding what their share of that cost bought them to be of dubious value.

For instance:
It is easy to come to the conclusion that Lenovo’s brief time as an Olympics sponsor was a result of what the, mostly, Chinese government owned company, with 2008 revenues of more than US $16 billion, and China believed its obligations were with regard to the Beijing 2008 Olympics. However, Lenovo, the biggest personal computer manufacturer in China and the company who now owns IBM’s PC business, after paying US $1.25 billion to buy it in 2005, apparently, considers the approximately US $72 million it paid to sponsor the Olympics thru Beijing 2008 beyond the amount Lenovo is willing to pay again.

American company Eastman Kodak has been an Olympics sponsor since the 1980’s yet a convincing argument can be made that the vast majority of consumers Eastman Kodak wants as customers have no idea Eastman Kodak is an Olympics sponsor and only vaguely consider Eastman Kodak a brand relevant to their needs. According to Chief Executive Antonio Perez Eastman Kodak, apparently, feels US $72 million paid to be an official Olympics sponsor is “not the best way for [Kodak]” to spend that amount of money. So whatever paying US $72 million to sponsor the Olympics did for Eastman Kodak it is, apparently, not something Eastman Kodak values highly.

To be fair there are, of course, exceptions. General Electric Company (GE) is, apparently, still an enthusiastic sponsor of the Olympics, but, then again, GE has not only paid for Olympics sponsorship Olympics sponsorship, one could say, has paid GE very handsomely. Including Olympics connected work done as recently as the Beijing 2008 Olympics, at Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium, GE has, cumulatively, gained more than US $688 million in revenues from over 395 Olympics connected “jobs” it has carried out. Indeed, based on the high value of the Olympic contracts GE has managed to get while being an Olympics sponsor one could easily argue that such continued Olympics sponsorship is a very good business decision for General Electric Company. Afterall, $688 million is a statistically significant percentage of GE revenue, even if that annual revenue was about $173 billion in 2007.

Coca Cola Company is also still an enthusiastic sponsor of the Olympics, but, then again, what choice does Coca Cola have. Coca Cola is, as I see it, the “king of the hill” in, maybe, the most highly contested and competitive industry in the world. In the special case of Coca Cola’s industry if Coca Cola does not aggressively market in a manner that keeps Coca Cola almost constantly “visible” to its consumers(essentially every living human being on the planet and off) then it may be all too easy for Coca Cola’s competitors to topple Coca Cola and replace it at the “top of the hill”. Obscurity(loss of brand awareness), for Coca Cola, almost always has the potential of looming just a few missed “strategic marketing opportunities” away. In Coca Cola’s industry brand awareness and massive amounts of marketing are one and the same and, in the special case of Coca Cola, the Olympics is a critically important marketing tool to help accomplish those goals. In a recent study only 40% of people interviewed in China could name just 1 Olympic sponsor. Coca Cola was that sponsor.

olympics sponsor