Super Bowl & Olympic Sponsorships Are a $10M Gamble—And Brands Are Losing!

This is the time of the year when brands that spent millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads will internally begin discussions whether the money spent was worth it, and brands that will sponsor next year’s Super Bowl and Winter Olympics should be preparing their public relations and promotions plans. Viewers of the Today show already know that NBC Universal, the network that will telecast the Olympics from Italy, has already begun its “happy talk, all is good propaganda” about the games.

As an individual, who has managed and played key roles in many mega sporting events, both from the client and event organizing side, below is what sponsors of events told me privately. Publicly, of course, they all say how happy they are with the ROI, even though they’re not.

Some years ago, when I was managing a highly recognized Major League Baseball (MLB) national sports marketing program for eight or nine years (it was a long time ago), which received mega earned media coverage with client identification and message points, the client told me, “Arthur, you’re doing a great job, but the truth is that we don’t know if we are getting any more benefit from bankrolling this project than we would with a none sports promotion. Our confidential surveys tell us that there are so many different companies involved in sports marketing that it’s difficult for consumers to differentiate one from another. The only way we can definitely know if we are getting our money’s worth is to drop the program and replace it with a none sports promotion in the same time period, like a Mother’s or Father’s Day one.” When MLB wanted to increase the rights fees, the client walked away from the program.

I had a similar conversation with a representative of a then-major sponsor of the Olympic Games who confided to me, “The only reason we keep sponsoring it is to keep our competitors from doing so.”

Which raises the question: Is it better for brands to be one of dozens of sponsors in a big pond, or is it better to be the sole sponsor in a smaller one?

With TV commercials for mega sports events costing as high as $8 million for a 30 second commercial, (2025 Super Bowl) not including production costs, and TV commercials for the 2024 Paris Summer Games 

on NBCUniversal (July 26 to Aug. 11, 2024) reaching record Olympic sales, the question that will again be debated among marketing specialists about next year’s Super Bowl and Olympics is—Are marketers getting their money’s worth by spending millions of dollars to advertise on events like the Super Bowl and Olympics?

“Hard to tell” is the only unbiased true answer because when a commodity product brand gets a quick boost from a TV ad it also uplifts other brands in the category. In effect, competitive brands that do not advertise are getting a free ride, the same as lesser-known politicians get when a more popular one on the same ballot wins overwhelmingly. 

Brand marketing execs had to be disappointed in the results of a 2021 Morning Consult poll conducted after the Tokyo Olympics, which found that NBCUniversal, which televised the games, was mentioned in 5% of responses, and only 4% credited sponsors Visa and Toyota. The highest share of responders, 1 in 3, said no brand came to mind after the event. Surprisingly, the poll revealed that 61% of Americans said they watched “not much” or “none” of the Olympics, a much larger share than anticipated based on pre-Games polling.

That so few people could remember the names of sponsors was not news to me. The multiyear baseball sports marketing campaign that I managed and mentioned earlier revealed that because of the clutter of brand sports promotions relatively few people knew the sponsor of the program, even though it always received significant major earned media coverage with sponsor identification throughout the years. 

Is the same true about the Super Bowl and Olympics? My guess would be yes, because there are similar undeniable aspects of both events.

What’s undeniable is that the Super Bowl and the Olympics are joined at the media hip during the weeks leading up to the start of their competitions: Negative publicity is the norm.

What’s also undeniable is that all mega sports telecasts have the same things in common: Commercials featuring competing products and commercials featuring actors and athletes. Athletes in commercials are so overused, many endorsing several products that it has reached the point where it’s unable to tell the athlete from the brand without a Dun & Bradstreet scorecard.

The great majority of media coverage leading up to this year’s Super Bowl, as it has been for years, was negative, with articles about gambling outpacing those about players’ brain injuries, which are now reported on throughout the year. (Prior to the gambling craze, the health problems of football players dominated pre-Super Bowl coverage). Seemingly, the only positive media coverage prior to the game this year was about the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce relationship.

As in past Olympics, the lead-up to the 2024 Paris Games received almost entirely negative coverage in print pubs, although you would never know so if all the news you got was from NBCUniversal, the U.S. telecasters of the games. Stories about bribery in awarding contracts, possible labor strikes, the dispute between some countries with the International Olympic Committee about letting athletes from Russia and Belarus compete and threats of boycotting the games by those opposing the IOC’s decision, and security concerns dominated the coverage and were reported on by the Associated Press and Reuters.

Missing from both the Super Bowl coverage and from the Paris Olympics, was much positive earned media for sponsors of the events, and history suggests as time draws closer to the start of the 2026 winter games in Italy and the 2028 summer games in Los Angeles that earned media about sponsor’s promotions in mainstream news outlets will be at a minimum, because the overwhelming number of sponsor-pitched stories are not considered newsworthy, except for advertising and marketing trade pubs.

Even though as a PR person, I’ve been involved in both Super Bowl and Olympics campaigns, I’ve always favored a more targeted, less expensive approach than one that just counts eyeballs. In my opinion, the ideal would be for a brand to be the sole sponsor of a lesser or self-created but publicizable event and supplement it with a savvy PR publicity program that can continue indefinitely.

A major problem with Super Bowl and Olympic publicity programs is that they all look alike. In order to gain positive earned media coverage, PR people should develop programs that stand out from the pack, and that means replacing the much copied and hackneyed playbook programs with original thinking, which usually is done by ambush marketers.

Creating your own newsworthy, publicizable sports marketing program can achieve what every client wants from its sports marketing promotions – an increase in sales that justifies the dollars investment, gaining new steady customers and positive earned media coverage that multimillion-dollar Super Bowl and Olympic brand campaigns are hard-pressed to deliver.