As the dust settles on the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, media buyers and advertisers are taking stock of the event's impact on viewership and advertising opportunities. This year's games marked a significant shift in how audiences watched, with streaming platforms playing a more prominent role than ever before. For advertisers, this evolution presents many opportunities to reach and engage with a diverse set of viewers across multiple platforms.
NBCUniversal's coverage of the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony set a new benchmark for viewership, drawing a total audience of 28.6 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, the media company said. This figure represents a 60% increase from the Tokyo Opening Ceremony and an 8% bump over the Rio Opening Ceremony, making it the most-watched Summer Olympics opening since London 2012.
The surge in streaming viewership was particularly noteworthy. Peacock, NBC's streaming platform, saw unprecedented engagement. The Opening Ceremony was the top entertainment event in Peacock's history, with over 2.5 million viewers. Streaming consumption increased sixfold over the Tokyo Olympics for a comparable period.
These numbers underscore a clear trend: while linear TV remains a crucial component of Olympics viewership, streaming platforms are rapidly gaining ground. "The evolution of streaming and the opportunity to watch Olympic content on Peacock transformed the Olympic viewing experiences, giving audiences greater choice, control, and more opportunities to tune in anytime, anywhere," said James Shears, VP of Business Development and Client Partnerships at XR Extreme Reach.
Attain analyzed Olympic advertisers’ transaction data following the games. Advertisers like Delta, Polo Ralph Lauren, and Nike showed respectable increases in average transaction sizes following their Olympics spots. Most notably, beverage brands’ purchase frequency ticked up substantially, increasing as much as 50% for Michelob Ultra.
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The substantial increase in purchase frequency for beverage brands is particularly striking, indicating that Olympics-themed marketing campaigns may have been especially effective in this category.
"With streaming, we're at a point now where advertisers should expect to drive measurable performance from their TV ads, and ads run during the Olympics are no exception," said Tim Edmundson, senior director of Content & Research at performance focused CTV platform MNTN.
Food and drink advertisers on MNTN’s platform saw strong performance throughout July with average revenue generated per advertiser increasing nearly 25% versus the previous month of June, Edmundson added.
That sentiment was echoed by other sources.
“The Olympics can drive significant performance for brands, especially for those directly tied to the event, like Nike or Puma,” said Adam Kline, CEO of video advertising platform Biddeo.io. “These companies benefit not just from the visibility of their ads but having their products seen on athletes.” This dual exposure reinforces brand affinity and drives performance, extending the impact of advertising beyond the immediate viewership of the Games.
Ads in big televised sporting events are often thought of as pure brand marketing – especially since they tend to be dominated by big, blue-chip brands advertising broad awareness plays, said Laurel Rossi, CMO of media technology company Infillion. “But you’d be surprised at the extent to which they can drive consumers further along in the purchase funnel.”
Rossi pointed to research suggesting that the Olympics produced a 47% increase in people more likely to search for a brand compared to standard programming.
“This down-funnel activation can have an enormous impact on both the visibility and conversion potential for a brand,” Rossi noted.
That said, with the Olympics streaming on Peacock, which has been trying out many new ad formats, advertisers can turn to rich media and interactive solutions that are able to reach consumers at any stage of the purchase funnel.
“Think about it: Your ad might be an informative brand message for totally unfamiliar consumers, but you can also make the same ad fully shoppable with an add-to-cart function,” Rossi said. “Interactivity offers the potential for a single ad to address the entire customer journey.”
Diversity and inclusion was a major focus of this summer’s games from all sides. For the first time in Olympics history, the number of men and women competing were equally represented. As for brands, XR Extreme Reach found darker skin tones were represented in 38% of Olympic ads, surpassing both the Super Bowl (14%) and the overall U.S. TV ad average for the first half of the year (28%). Female gender representation in Olympic ads was slightly below the first-half benchmark of 43%.
Those numbers highlight how focusing on diversity within a major viewing event can pay off for brands to better reflect their audiences during major sporting events. It’s the ability to be both niche and mass, without sacrificing either audience goals.
Lastly, the Olympics drew a completely new audience of less-traditional sports viewers. There are people who would never tune into Olympic basketball who got really interested in, say, the canoe slalom, Rossi pointed out.
“The brands that advertised during these games likely got a lot more of a boost than they ever expected,” she said. “This means a bigger, more diverse audience of sports fans than ever before. The media strategy for reaching this diverse but fragmented cohort of enthusiasts across streaming platforms is totally different than linear TV advertising. You need really precise targeting and audience data to know you’re reaching the right person.”
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