Marketing During the Olympics: How to Maximize Your Online Campaigns

The 2024 Olympic Games are just around the corner, and that means ramping up your Olympics marketing campaigns.

But before that, let’s take a moment to understand just how huge this event is going to be.

Fifteen million people are expected to visit Paris during the 2024 Olympic Games (is it any wonder that hotel prices in Paris are sky-high?). Together, they will spend an estimated 2.6 billion euros.

Around 1.5 billion people worldwide will tune in to the opening ceremony on TV or via internet streaming.

This is quite a change from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The last games were delayed till 2021 due to the global pandemic, and when they did go ahead, there were no spectators allowed at any of the sporting events.

In 2024, the Olympics is a once-in-four-year opportunity to promote your brand. With zillions of bytes of Olympic broadcasting, news, entertainment, and commentary online, it is time for marketers to think about how they can join in on the potential profits.  

Advertising During the Olympics: Take Advantage of the Interest Surge

During the last Olympics in 2021, there was a surge in internet streaming among viewers of the games. Of course, this reflected the situation at the time, with lockdowns and social distancing rules in place.

Streaming remains a popular channel for Olympic viewing, with around 32% of US viewers expected to stream the games via the internet. With more time spent online around the Olympics, digital advertisers have a greater opportunity to reach their target audiences with compelling content and messages.

Moreover, sports have a unique ability to unite and inspire people around a common passion, in every city and nation. At a time when there is a heightened need for unity and hope, brands like yours are in an ideal position to deliver messages that connect people to their offerings.  

A key way to tap into these sentiments and boost brand exposure during the Olympics is native advertising. With native ads, marketers can recommend their product or service via targeted ads on premium publisher sites worldwide. That means delivering focused messages and content to relevant target audiences on the open web, and driving high-quality traffic and conversions, at an incredibly opportune time.

Why is Native Advertising Important to Olympics Marketing?

The best time to ‘talk’ to your target audience is when they are interested and engaged. This makes the Olympics a huge opportunity for advertisers. Of course, people are watching the sporting events, but more than that, they are checking the news, reading commentary, and following all the other parts of the Olympics that make it so exciting – the opening and closing ceremonies, the stories of sportsmanship, national wins and losses, and much more.

During this kind of special global event, particularly when it happens only once every four years, it’s an exceptionally good time to reach large audiences who are deeply engaged and attuned, and at the same time to enjoy great ROI for your advertising investment.

Here are some of the key advantages of native advertising that are so powerful for marketing, especially during the Olympics:

Brand safety

While the Olympics brings a surge in interest and audiences, it also brings a surge in ads. The best way to keep your brand safety intact and to avoid getting entangled with poor-quality ads and brands is by leveraging a high-quality platform like Outbrain. Our premium publisher network and strict advertising guidelines mean that Outbrain ad placements and content are always top quality, attracting high-potential audiences on the world’s best publisher sites. 

Targeting across interests

Sports fans are not the only ones watching the Olympics, although they are more likely to. People with all sorts of interests gather around a global event like the Olympics. Citizens in different countries follow their national team, even if they don’t usually follow sports. With interest targeting, advertisers can serve native ads to different audiences, based on the content they want to read or view. For example, according to Outbrain BrainPower data, 24% of native ad conversions come from placements on Entertainment sites and 35% from News sites (as of this writing). 

Websites in those categories are a great place to promote ads and capture the attention of people who are looking for content about the Olympics.

Lots of ad formats

Significant advances in adtech mean that native ads are no longer just “Sponsored article” ads. Take a look at the Outbrain Ads Gallery for a complete world of ad formats, such as carousel ads, video ads, app install ads, native social ads, and much more. These formats provide advertisers with far more options to create native ads and recommendations for different conversion goals and audiences than ever before.

Automated optimization

The Olympics falls at the peak of the summer when marketers are incredibly busy (and maybe even planning to take a vacation…). Being able to automate digital ad campaigns takes a lot of work off already heavy shoulders. 

With Outbrain Conversion Bid Strategy (CBS), advertisers can go several steps further and even automate the optimization of campaigns according to pre-defined conversion goals. This is a huge bonus during a global event like the Olympics when internet users are behaving in a dynamic way based on fast-changing events on the ground. By using CBS, advertisers can be sure their campaigns are automatically optimizing based on those changing behaviors in real-time. 

Maximize Your Wins with Native Advertising

The Olympics is one of the few truly international events, and it’s a huge deal for marketers. Over the years, the way people watch and enjoy the Olympics naturally changes. Traditional TV still rules, but streaming is having a big impact.

According to Nielsen’s Paris 2024 Olympics Insights Hub, around 35% of consumers are likely to be more interested in a product due to the brand sponsoring the Olympics games. And Simone Biles is the most influential Olympic athlete, commanding an average of over $93,000 for a branded social media post.

The good news is, you don’t have to be a big brand spending big bucks to perform well in Olympics marketing. While there are a lot of moving parts in marketing during the Olympics, try Outbrain native advertising – with all its benefits – as a surefire way to keep up.