In this episode of the Fanalytics podcast, the host delves into the future of Olympic fandom, examining its current state and potential evolution. The discussion outlines the strengths and weaknesses of Olympic fandom, emphasizing the paradoxical nature of its widespread appeal yet diminishing viewership. The episode is structured in three parts: the foundation of Olympic fandom, the 'WILD' framework for analyzing fandom, and the impact of demographics, technology, and marketing on future trends. Key points include national identification, the historical and narrative richness of the Olympics, and the potential for leveraging fragmented media to reach diverse audiences. The host highlights challenges like maintaining continuous engagement and attracting younger generations while underscoring the role of powerful brand partners and media in shaping the future of Olympic fandom.
In this episode of the Fanalytics podcast, the focus is on examining the future of Olympic fandom, particularly in light of the upcoming Paris Olympic Games. The episode is divided into three parts: the foundational strength of Olympic fandom, an analysis of fandom using the WILD framework, and the impact of demographics, technology, and marketing on the future of Olympic fandom. Key highlights include the historical paradox of Olympic viewership, the strong national identification that fuels fandom, and the challenges posed by the fragmented media landscape and changing demographics. The episode emphasizes the need for ongoing narrative storytelling and innovative marketing to sustain and grow Olympic fandom.
00:00 Introduction to the Fanalytics Podcast
00:54 Structure of the Episode
01:58 Foundations of Olympic Fandom
02:09 The Paradox of Olympic Viewership
03:21 Historical Context and Media Evolution
06:52 Olympic Stories and Cultural Significance
11:45 Dimensions of Fandom: The WILD Framework
15:26 Influences on Olympic Fandom
19:30 Lifecycle of Olympic Fandom
21:28 Display of Olympic Fandom
23:09 Summarizing Olympic Fandom
24:05 Future of Olympic Fandom: Key Forces
25:01 Distribution and Interaction with Cultural Content
25:06 The Role of Marketing in Cultural Institutions
26:02 Demographics: The First Main Factor
26:30 Impact of Migration on National Identity and Fandom
28:30 Generational Shifts in Olympic Fandom
30:49 Gender Differences in Olympic Fandom
32:28 Technology's Influence on the Olympics
36:35 Marketing: The Wild Card
43:26 The Future of Olympic Fandom
48:21 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Fanalytics podcast. Today, we're going to continue our series on future fandom with a look at. Essentially the summer's biggest sports event and that is the Paris Olympic games. Now the Olympics games are really, really kind of a classic. Sporting event. Sort of the ultimate in sports spectacle, right.
Something that comes around every four years and is at least historically, maybe not currently was historically the center of attention. Okay. Now the future of fandom series is something that I. Something that I be archiving at the sub stack, which is Fanalytics dot . Dot com and as always, you'll find all the links and sort of the clearinghouse on my online home@fandomanalytics.com. So we'll do this in. So we'll do this in three parts. First part we'll explore the foundations of Olympic fandom. Really setting the baseline, right.
In terms of what is the current strength of the Olympic games? The second part, we'll dive into different dimensions of fandom using our wild framework. This notion of. You know how much people identify the we part of sports. What the influences are the, the I part. The Al the lifecycle of both fans and the Olympic games of the cultural institution and D the propensity of. The propensity to display your fandom. The third part we'll then dig into. How three key forces demographics. Technology and marketing. Are pushing the Olympics to some, to some future.
So what is the, you know, given the present state, given the idiosyncrasies of Olympic fandom, And current trends, technology, demographics, marketing, whereas the Olympic fandom likely to end up in the near term. So our starting point. Thinking about the foundations of Olympics fandom. Right. The current foundational strength. Of the Olympics. Now. Throughout this episode. I'm going to keep coming back to the word paradox. The Olympics fandom is a bit of a paradox. It's got some really significant strengths and some really significant weaknesses. If we just start off looking at. Sort of core metrics, for example. And I will put the, I will put figures and numbers on the, on the sub stack article that goes along with the podcast. Yeah. The Olympics really paint a mixed picture. So.
The viewership of the opening ceremonies for the average viewership of any Olympic games. They tend to be all over the place. I mean, there's no clear, there's no clear trend. Going back to. Going back to Seoul in 1988, about 21 million viewers of the opening games. The, the, the Tokyo Olympics was down to 16. The 2012 viewership. In London was about 41 million. 39 million in Atlanta in 1996. So the numbers for viewership have really bounced around. Now, this is, this is sort of an interesting thing because look. When we go back to solve that we're talking about 1988. I'm away. When we, when we go to Tokyo in 2021 or 2022. That. You know, we're talking about.
Very different media environments. Right. 1988. We were still very much in a cable and network TV focused media culture. So the Olympics really took center stage. Now we go forward to. The Tokyo games and we're in a very distributed and fragmented media environment. Where, you know, essentially we're not gathered around TVs.
Now people are sort of spread out, looking at their phones. So for the numbers too. Not really be doing anything systematic over time is interesting. And I think it's very much a, it's gotta be a product of very much the world. Just sort of the, the games. Evolving as the world has changed. I mean, you look at. You look at NBC's TV package for this year's games. And man, there's a lot of opportunities to watch different clips. You can follow up and this is just in the pre-game period. You can also sort of dig deeply and just watch the events you're interested in. The games are now no longer, just on a single channel.
They're spread out through the entire NBC. Set of outlets, including the peacock streaming service.
So the Olympics has adapted. And viewership has. It hasn't collapsed. Right. It's held relatively steady. Now it's not an entirely positive story. Given that the growth in the U S population has been significant from 1988 to to the current, to the current 2024.
But the Olympics has in, well, the Olympics clearly hasn't expanded with that. But they haven't. Tended to really fall into. Niche. Nice status. Now. Why I say it's always a bit of a paradox is that wow. Viewership has stayed similar. What has happened with rights fees as they have gone up again and again, and again.
Now we've seen this in a lot of different sports where viewership tends to be heading downward. I mean again, I'll always call it this example. Michael Jordan used to have 35 40 million people watching his NBA finals of ads. Now we're down to about 10, 12 million people. But MBA rights fees keep going up.
So the Olympics are in a position where the rights fees continue to increase. Viewership seems to be trending down maybe a little bit, or maybe just sort of held steady and becoming something, something a little different. No longer sort of a mass audience, everyone watching the. Everyone watching the opening ceremonies.
Now maybe people just tuning into the specialized events that they're interested in.
Now I will. Again, I'll have. More numbers and figures in the piece on, on the sub stack, the Fanalytics down subs tact. Dot com.
But beyond even. But beyond. Just the quantitative metrics related to Olympic fandom. I always end up, this is like, this is true for any fandom. I always want to think through. The foundation in terms of the stories of a fandom. Because I think the numbers only capture so much when we start to think about the stories. That are shared across a fan base. This really starts to help us understand how strong, how deep Really the significance of a fandom to the fandom subculture members. And again, this is where the Olympics becomes such an interesting property. There is no sporting event. With a deeper history of stories. Right.
The Olympics. Go back to ancient Greece. Right. Now, I'm not even saying that people know the stories from the Olympiads in ancient Greece. Or what form the Olympiad in ancient Greece took. But as part of the narratives of the game, So the games have this. Foundational structure. That this is an, this is a sporting event. With thousands of years of history. Nevermind. A pretty significant gap between ancient Greece and. The game's starting up about a hundred, 120 years ago. Beyond that. But it's a unique, the unique narrative that no other sporting event can, can claim now beyond the narrative associated with the games itself. There are stories. Upon stories, you know, the, the Olympic games. It really is a matter of just essentially how old the fan is in terms of what the Olympic stories are.
Some of the Olympic stories have to be, especially the ones with some political overtones, Jesse Owens in the Berlin, Berlin Olympics in 1936. Cassius clay, 1960. The Olympic the sprinter podium protests in 1968. The terrorism and the 1972 games along with. American athletes like mark Spitz, dominating swimming. Bruce Jenner now, Caitlyn Jenner in the decathlon in 1976, all over Wheaties boxes. The boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Of course, 1980 also saw the miracle on ice in the winter games in lake Placid, 1984, Mary Lou Retton Edwin Moses. It goes on and on through Michael Phelps, dominate, you know, being the dominant us athlete in the, in the two thousands, Katie Ledecky, Simone Biles, as some of the stars of the more recent Olympiads. So the Olympics have story after story after story. Now you compare that to just about any. And again, we'll always come back to American sports teams. The stories that in New York Yankees fan ass, right. It's very comparable. .
But the stories have been out there for more than a hundred years. They feature great moments, inspirational athletes. But there is something a little bit different about the limbic stories. Right. So with a fan base, that's concentrated in a geographical area, a city. These stories tend to be very much shared and passed out across generations.
In the case of the Olympics, you have the stories, you have the story, you have the narratives. What ends up being a little bit shakier is the network within the stories are transmitted across fandom. We know about the 1936 games and Jesse Owens because it's in the history books. We don't really get that because of. The, you know, the communication other Olympic Olympic fans. The Olympic fan is. Sort of something that only pops up every four years.
So you just don't have the opportunity to continually share and rehearse and, you know, sort of build on these stories. The Olympics stories are almost like chapters from a history book, rather than the stories that just sort of underlie and support a vibrant and current fandom.
All right. So the Olympic fandom. Is really the foundations of a women fandom. Our sort of a mixed bag. There's great stories. Great narratives. But in some ways they're almost too stretched out. Right. So unlike most fandoms that we think about. They look, the stories are great in that they span centuries and they span different sports. But it's also a weakness of the stories, right?
We're not just talking about winning super bowls or winning world series. We've got gymnast. We've got ancient Greece. We've got sprinters. Not getting handshakes from the Nazi regime. Right. So essentially it's. It's a rich set of stories, but maybe it's too spread out. Right. Both historically and across the sports.
Now the second stage of breakdown of a fandom. Is using what I mentioned, the wild framework. So thinking about how the Phantom works across several key dimensions. Okay. The first one. And really, you know, the first one is this notion we win. How much.
Identification happens between the fan. And the sport, or really, again, any cultural entity, how much of the, is it the fan talks about we did this. We won. We lost. . I thought the Olympic fandom is really a fascinating topic because in some ways, The biggest thing that the Olympics has going for it. Is this notion of we, because the athletes. Our clad in national uniforms. Right? So there's an automatic starting point that if there's an American team out there, I'm rooting for that American team, because I am part of that. I'm part of that thing, right? I'm part of that nation of that culture. Where we are in it together.
We are the American basketball team, the American soccer team. The American track team, et cetera. So it's an automatic thing that the Olympics starts out with. That is incredibly, incredibly powerful. It is very, very rare in fact, and I can only think of really one case. Of a national team. Generating even. A slight amount of dislike and that's the, that's the us women's soccer team. But in general, when you clad your athletes and the national colors that we, as something automatic. Now the, we is a little bit different again with the Olympics because of the, the nature of the games occurring every four years. Because the teams turn over so much and because the individual athletes seldom. Attend more than one Olympics. The wi the identification tends to weaken a little bit, right? If I'm watching the track team. And there isn't an athlete that I recognize.
Right. Cause I'm just a casual track fan. If I don't recognize most of the swimmers names, it's hard to really get that, that full identification that if I'm watching the Atlanta Braves and I see these guys out there every day, right. So I lose some of that familiarity. The other part of the, we win. And this is an important part that people don't talk about enough. Is, it's gotta be something aspirational.
And again, here's some somewhere where the Olympics really wins. Because the Olympics is always positioned as the height of human achievement. Right. These are weightlift. The sprinters are running as fast as I can. As fast as any human being can. The swimmers are swimming as fast as any human being on camera.
The weightlifters are lifting as much weight as a human being. Can. So. The Olympic games are inherently aspirational, right? They're talking about the maximum performance of a human being. So in terms of this, this kind of key element. This notion of this we identification. This is one of the real strengths of the Olympics. And again, it's a critical one because you've got a natural fan base.
It's going to come together for every Olympic games and we are going to root for the USA or for Mexico. We're gonna root for the Mexican team or great Britain. Or in China, et cetera, et cetera. So our real strength of the Olympic game is that national identity essentially taking the United States brand, putting it on the team, and you've got a ready to go fan base. All right. So the second element in terms of breaking down the fandom in terms of sub dimensions is influences. So where does Bandom come from? What are the influences that lead to fans sticking around between subsequent Olympic games and new fans coming in? Now. The classic influences is the family unit.
Right? So if mom and dad were fans of the St. Louis Cardinals or the Dallas Cowboys, And junior grows up. You. His first piece of clothing is a Dallas cowboy onesy. That is an incredibly powerful influence. Other classic influences our peers. So you go to school and suddenly in second grade and third grade, everyone's a fan of the local team. .
So this is. This is where the Olympics again, the Olympics, I can't stress this enough. The Olympics is such an interesting. Fandom with such a unique potential in so many unique challenges. The Olympics is going to tend to not have that type of community or local fandom influences. It's just not going to happen.
And again, it has something to do with the structure of the games. Maybe mom grew up watching Mary Lou Reddit. And she wants to pass. And so she's a fan of the Olympics, but she can't pass down her fandom for Mary Lou. Retton right. Cause Mary Lou Retton doesn't exist. What persists. Is the U S women's Olympics team, but it's a little bit.
It's not, it's not the same as the New York Yankees or the St. Louis Cardinals. The Olympics main influence has historically been mass media. Right. The Olympics are expectable. And the media coverage has been intense and very well done, you know, incredibly powerful. Production. Great images. Great promotion. Now the challenge for the Olympics.
I mean, again, because it used to be the Olympics took center stage, all the magazines, all the newspapers, the TV network. Especially the one covering the games. The focus was on the Olympics. So it was not so much a matter of kind of, well, you might say guerrilla marketing of happening within the community or the individual level.
It was a top down. Top-down is tough in this current environment where everyone has their phone. And everyone can make their own content choices. Now that being said, there are some elements of the modern environment. That are a positive for the Olympics. Right? So NBC. Doesn't have to just go after an audience. By putting the, the programming on their main, their main line network.
Right. They can put it on their specialty networks. They can put it on the web, right. And when you start putting it on the web, now you've got an ability to influence smaller micro segments, people that are interested in different sports. Social media is very much a wild card in all this. Right. It'll be interesting to see how well NBC does in terms of pushing out Olympic content on social media channels. I don't think. I don't think the networks and the Olympics have done all that well on social media going forward. But now social media is such a dominant thing, especially for acquiring this newer, younger generation of gen Z and gen alpha fans. That this is where it's gotta be.
So in terms of the influences again, mixed bag. mixed situation. The Olympics has. It's got a history. So Olympic fandom is embedded in the community. But the structure of the games have happening every four years and across a lot of different sports makes it tough for those kinds of influences. To be the key.
So the Olympics has really relied on a, on a lot of promotion, a lot of media coverage. Now. You know that that's a little bit more challenging. But maybe there's a way with the media becoming more fragmented that you can leverage. Sort of the fragmented nature of the Olympics in terms of different sports and going after different audiences.
Okay. The L component, the lifecycle component. When I talk about life cycle and fandom, I'm talking about really the lifecycle of two things, the lifecycle of the fan. And the lifecycle of the cultural institution. The cultural institution here, the Olympics, the lifecycle is indefinite. The, like I said, the Olympics has thousands of years of history and a century of modern history. The Olympics are something that feels relatively permanent. Now one thing that's different, but to me in the Olympics and most cultural institutions, though, Is that the life cycle tends to be interrupted, right?
It's big in 2024. And then at least for the summer games, it goes dormant for four years. So it's a little bit different. It's indefinite. So it's a permanent institution, but it's not one that operates continuously. And I think that's a fairly significant challenge for the games. In terms of the fan life cycle, and this is why the game's not opera and continuously is such a challenge. I don't know. What the fan life cycle is for the Olympics. Historically, it has been such a major event that everyone was kind of a casual Olympic fan. It may be not an intense fan, but everyone's kind of casual they'll tune in.
They'll see the sprinters, the weightlifters, the swimmers. The novelty. The smaller sports archery. Biathlon. You know, all these kinds of rowing. All these kinds of things.
And maybe that worked in the past, but it's a real question going forward. If that lifecycle will be able to persist. And will people keep coming back? To subsequent games. Right. The media landscape, the sports landscape is so much more crowded than it used to be. And so will people, you know, are we in a situation where once you acquired a fan for the Olympics, they were always a fan for subsequent Olympics, or are we now in something where there's so much content out there? That you need to essentially reacquire the customer, the fan. At each Olympic game. And the last element is display. So the look, when I think of these, these four categories or these four dimensions of fandom. We win is the key one.
To me. It's this internal feeling. D is essentially. The reverse of that. I mean, it's a related concept, but this idea that I'm going to display my Olympic fandom, I'm going to wear an Olympic shirt. I'm going to collect Olympic memorabilia. Again, I think this is somewhere where the Olympics. Where you start to see some cracks in the Olympics. It's just not something that has enough. Ongoing. I tension that people want to are necessarily going to publicly identify with. .
It's something that goes away and the athletes go away. So it's nothing that you really want to, in some ways, It's something that you're not going to see a lot of fans building shrines to. Because it keeps changing. It keeps disappearing. Now the one place where you do see the display. Is. Especially during the opening ceremonies, what you'll see people really decked out in their national colors.
So again, You can see how some of these things are related. The national people are putting themselves out. There is national us fans or Mexico fans or great Britain fans or Russia fans. If they're allowed to participate. Yeah, but they're not so much as Olympic fans, right? The Olympic teams. And again, maybe that's, I'm not sure that that's an entirely clear. So much of this as the identification with the national team. It just so happens to be occurring at the Olympics. Okay, so to sum up. When we start to break the Olympic Fe Olympic fandom down into these dimensions. We really do start to flesh out. A fairly robust picture of what Olympic fandom looks like. The biggest strengths are the national identification.
So the fact that the us Olympic teams represents America. So they've got a built in fan base. Some of the biggest weaknesses of the Olympics seem to occur or be related to the fact that the games are not continuously operated. That they show up in a big way. And then they disappear for four years. Which really makes it a little bit of a challenge to get powerful community-based influences dry fandom to maintain the fan lifecycle across games and to really put an, make the Olympics something there.
People want to publicly display their fandom with.
All right. Part three then.
Now that we've broken down. We've assessed Olympic fandom and we've broken it down into dimensions to more fully understand how it works. Step three is to think about how a couple of critical forces. Our three critical forces are likely to influence where Olympic fandom is going to go. Okay. The two. Sort of external forces are demographics. Fandom is a cultural phenomena. When people are fans of determines the society and the culture we live in. And the society we live in is essentially the people that make up that society. So how demographics are changing is likely is definitely going to affect the future of all cultural institutions. The second component technology technology really relates to how we consume. Cultural content. So, how is it distributed?
How do we watch it? How do we interact with it? Then the third is very much the wild card, but in the case of the Olympics, It is the big one. And that is marketing. Because all these cultural institutions. You know, maybe a couple hundred, a hundred years ago. Cultural institutions. Just focused on doing what they did on creating their cultural content. But now the act of management fandom is pervasive. Every cultural institution be at a university, a political party. Sports franchise, a movie franchise. They are all interested in maximizing, growing and managing and building there. There are fandom.
And so the marketers are the people that get essentially an active role in terms of dictating where fandom is going to go. And the Olympics. Marketing is really, really important. Okay. So the first factor. The first main factor demographics. Now it's. It's almost tautological to say the demographics determine everything. The people. Determine what society is. And so that, you know, what is embedded in society. Really reflects what society will be interested in essentially tomorrow. So with demographics, like everything else in this Olympic story. There are some real complexity and some real uncertainty. The big thing, demographically tapping into American society.
As of course, Migration. Demographic change rate, changing the racial composition of the country. So there's an open question. And so there's no, there's an open question in terms of how demographic forces will change Olympic fandom. So remember one of the key things the Olympics has going for it. Is people are rooting for the national team. Well with mass immigration. Does national identity decrease in importance? Again, it's a very legitimate question.
One of the things we've seen in soccer in this country for example, is that the Mexican national team, when they play friendlies on American soil, They sell out. I had people come out. So as this country becomes more Hispanic. Well, these newer Americans will they root for the American soccer team or while they've Ru. Well, or will they root for the Colombian soccer team or the Mexican. Where the Ecuadorian soccer team. Right.
And so as national identity,
What happens with migration? One possibility isn't national identity softens, right? That there's less of this weed type fandom with us. We, when fandom.
Now on the other side of this.
Having a multicultural society. Where people are rooting for teams across the globe and not just team USA. There is potentially an advantage to that. Right. So maybe we're not just tuned in to see the American soccer team or the American basketball team. But there's also an audience for when the Chinese basketball team takes the floor. Or when the Mexican soccer team is playing. So, you know what I net I suspect that what demographics will do. Is maybe weak in some of the intense fandom, but maybe broaden some of the appeal.
Right. So maybe a little bit less intensity. But more appeal to different segments. Okay. Other parts of the demographic story.
I've collected. I collect data on an annual basis. I call it the related to fandom. I call it the next generation fandom survey. One of the questions I asked is, is about Phantom for the Olympics. And again, this will be in the article. If you want to see the graph will be in the article on the sub stack. But one of the things I looked at is how Olympic fandom is changing across the demographic segments.
And one of the really striking data points. Is that demographic is that Olympic fandom. Almost changes by about five percentage points. So, so what I mean by that? Is that. If I look at the baby boomers. For example. And I just say, are you fans of the Olympics? I get about. Let me give you the exact number.
35.5% of the baby boomers identify or indicate that they're fans of the Olympics. As I moved downwards to the younger generations.
It drops off by about five percentage points for each generation. So I come up with. 30.5% of gen X are Olympic fans. 25.7% of millennials are Olympic fans. And only 18.5% of gen Z.
No, it's really striking in a lot of ways. It's a pattern that you don't see in other sports and other sports fandom tends to peak with millennials and then drops to. The gen X tends to be. Second. Gen Z is basically disengaged with sports, but this drop-off is really. It's really significant in that it seems to be moving in parallel. You know, as younger generations have become of age. They are the ones that have experienced a more fragmented media culture. And so the data seems to suggest that. Younger viewers, it's going to be a tough, it's going to be a tough. Challenge for the Olympics to get the younger viewers, the gen Z and gen alpha following. I want to make them committed Olympic fans. One thing that the Olympics does happen. As a, as a potential advantage though. If you look at fandom rates. For the Olympics across genders, male and female segments. You find. Almost equivalent, but just about as many slightly more men identify as fans of the Olympics. Men women.
Okay. And I think that might strike people as a little bit strange, given that. Men tend to be more interested in football or baseball. And the Olympic seems to really kind of cater to the female audience with gymnastics and more women's sports.
But when I look across sports, And I assess fandom. Almost universally. I find more men are sports fans. It doesn't even matter. What the sport is. It's a universal phenomenon. Women are more fans of Taylor, swift men are more fans of sports. What's interesting about the Olympics is that the gap is relatively small. So women. I have just about the same fandom rates as men.
So. If you want it to look at this. As a. Potential demographic trend of women are becoming more interested in sports. Now, again, this is almost, we're talking about a theoretical segment. But the societal standards are changing and women are more interested in sports. This might bode well for the Olympics. So, you know, we put all these things together and we, you know, weakening national identity. Is potentially a core threat to Olympic fandom. The drop-off and fandom for the younger. For the younger viewers, again, a dangerous warning signal.
But a little bit of hope in that. You know, the narrative storytelling of the Olympics does seem to have more strength with female audiences.
So our second major force is technology. technology is something that is a. Has already delivered a threat or a problem for the Olympics. Right. So we've already talked a little bit about how the Olympics went from this mass market spectacle. That was all over time magazine and all over the networks to something that was a little bit more niche oriented, because there's just so many more choices. The Olympias became just another choice.
So the Olympics has led to this fragmented media market that has hurt is positioned as something that unified society society all comes together and watches the Olympics for, for two, three weeks. Society leaves that with having you know, Bruce Jenner's Olympics, Mary Lou reddens Olympics. So technology has made it tough for the Olympics to maintain its role as a unifying cultural event.
But I think there's hope. Great. I think this splintered technological environment, if the Olympics are smart, Provide some opportunities. I, the only picks are unique in, in, in several ways. Right. They're unique in that the entire culture. Right. All these different countries, all these different cultures. Et cetera. Now that's, that's great.
Right? And that's part of the Olympic brand of the world coming together. But when a marketer hears those worlds of words,
A light bulb goes off and they, they should start to think about, well, there's all these different segments, right? So this is something. You know, we have Chinese viewers, we have Argentinian viewers. We have American viewers. The other part of this story, right? The other thing about the Olympics. Is that the Olympics are unique in that it's not just one sport, right?
It's not FIFA. It's not just soccer. It's not just the. You know, an international basketball tournament. It's not the world championship of track and field. It's just about everything. Right. So you've got, you've got, you've got sprinters. You've got distance runners. You've got gymnast. You have synchronized swimmers.
You have gymnastics, you have canoers, you have rowers, you have archers. It goes on and on. So. One of the things that our marketers are hearing all that. Is is again, there's all these different, it's like the Olympics has this massive product portfolio, right? The Olympics has something for just about. Just about everyone you like. Like the world loves soccer, biggest sport in the world.
They got a soccer tournament. Basketball, maybe the second biggest sport. Crickets in there as well.
But we got basketball, we got soccer. So we got LeBron James, we have international, you know, clear international superstars taking part. But if you're into skateboarding, This is your premier event, right? This is where you get to actually be a little bit in the spotlight. In this country, Greg Louganis, a diver, a sport that Americans generally don't care anything about. Was a massive star.
So all these different audiences. Does better with women does better with old people with older folks. And in terms of the baby boomer generation, All these different sports. The Olympics have great potential as something that can be used to. Maybe not have a mass audience, maybe the Olympics are not going to get 40 million people regularly for the opening ceremonies. But can they put all of these different products together? And all of these different segments together to build a mass audience. Piece by piece.
And so I think technology. If the Olympics are good at this. If they're creative. Can provide sort of a relatively bright future for the games because they should be able to package up all the package up all these sub products for these different segments of sports lovers and ethnicities. And put something together under this Olympic umbrella brand. The third force. The wild card. And frankly, the most important for us for the Olympics and for most culture cultural institutions, frankly, is marketing. Yeah. Because we're not living in an environment where society just passively. Adopts, what is put in front of them, right. Institutions. Consumers have choices. And institutions are interested in influencing those choices. The other thing that differentiates the Olympics in addition to being worldwide and stretching across all different types of sports. Is that the Olympics. Has a long tradition. Of almost being more like as much an advertising platform. As a sports competition. Growing up. I mean, I could remember the, the big brands,
visa, Coca Cola. Kodak. These massive brands always. Trying to be associated with the Olympics and it makes a lot of sense. Right? So if the Olympics, the Olympics narrative is about the purity of sports. The excellence of human of human accomplishment. These are enormous positives that brands want to have associated with them. Themselves. And on top of it. When the entire world is looking at the games.
Well, this becomes an incredibly attractive things for brands too, for brands to be a part of. Right. If you're Coca-Cola. You can put your logo. On an Olympic venue and the entire world sees it. So the Olympics are. The Olympics have been tied together with marketing for a long time. In some ways the Olympics were the forerunner of the modern. Of the modern sports marketing world. Where. All these international competitions or even desires to build super league.
So soccer, super league. Almost all of this is driven by marketing by marketing opportunities and by marketing dollars.
For the 2024 Paris Olympics. Some of the major sponsors include Alibaba. Coca-Cola Intel omega. Samsung Toyota visa. The media rights in the us are NBC.
And I mean, I, and I, I list that off. Right. NBC also has the peacock streaming service.
What's interesting. About that list of brands and the media. Is the word we attached to it, right. So do we call these sponsors? Or do we call these partners now the Olympics on their website, we'll refer to them as partners. And I think they should be referred to as partners. Because these folks, the media. And you think about incentives for a second.
The Olympics one, a lot of people to watch. The games. So does NBC. Right. So their incentives are completely aligned. So NBC has every incentive to build a website that delivers the narratives. Right. If you want the backstory on the U S is gold metal help and canoeing. Maybe it's going to be there, right?
If you want the bag, if the, if there's a potential star in the wrestling arena. NBC's likely going to put a five minute package together, putting their narrative out there.
The brands. Also we're interested in. Reaching a worldwide audience. So the brands have every incentive, the brands incentives are completely consistent with the Olympics incentives.
So. As we think about where the Olympics are going forward. The Olympics has a lot of powerful partners, right. In anything. You know, you think about this as the media, the brands in the Olympics. How much of the marketing. R is the Olympics actually doing it. And again, you know, actually I should clarify how much of the marketing is the international Olympic committee doing?
How much of the marketing is the national Olympic committees? Do.
Versus how much is being delivered by the marketing. And the brand sponsors.
I suspect that. The Olympics thinks about their brand. But they haven't had to think a lot about their brand. And look, this is true across almost all sports, right. People love sports, societies love sports. So a lot of times the promotion ends up being free. But man, the Olympics are so. I want to sort of say guilty of that. But the Olympics have been gifted with so much brand support, immediate support. That I don't think they've spent a lot of time thinking about the Olympics umbrella brand. And how to build that and maintain that. Over time. But, you know, back to this issue, where is Olympic fandom going in the future? There's a lot of powerful supporters of the Olympic brands. So, I mean, some of the, some of the discussion of the podcast has revealed significant weaknesses. But there are active. Brands and active media companies. Partners that have every incentive to help the Olympics and to maintain that Olympics brand. You know, maybe the FIFA soccer tournament is a better international. Advertising platform at this point. But in terms of things that are sort of concentrated in the entire world is watching. The Olympics. You know, they are at least second. Right.
So there's so much support for this and moving forward as it becomes more and more difficult to reach audiences, as technology causes everything to fragment, the Olympics will always be that singular event that can really be. It's a singular event that people can really try and deliver powerful marketing programs through. Moving forward. The Olympics has. Clear strengths. National identity. It's the big one. A portfolio of products enables them to reach potentially more segments. And also a significant weakness, right? The Olympics is largely losing. Its seems to be losing its. It's position as a. Sports spectacle that unites the country and unites the world for two to three weeks. Significant weakness with gen Z sports fans in particular.
So the question is where does the Olympics go moving forward?
What can they actually do?
I think the approach that. I think the way forward is actually pretty obvious. So one of the things that the Olympics has always done very well with is narrative storytelling. Right. They've always done great features or the media partners with job develop great features related to the stars of any given games.
Right. Turn the sport into. Human interest as much as athletic competition.
Now this goes, this goes all the way back to where I start to talk about. Sports fandom, right. As something that is. The, the, the key is really the shared stories. And so the Olympics way forward. Is probably to keep going well. Is to continue to emphasize story storytelling, story creation. But the way forward has got to be some mechanism for closing the gap.
A lot of what I've discussed over the last 45 minutes has been related to. The weaknesses have been related to the fact that the Olympics tend to, they show up for three weeks. That's great. And then they disappear for four years. What the Olympics needs to do is to start to build its brand out. So it operates continuously.
Even if you, if we think about some of the, some of the sports that make up the Olympics track and field, for example, and I mentioned track because track has always been sort of the backbone of the Olympics, right? The a hundred meter dash. The marathon, right. These are, I mean, Track and field that goes back to ancient Greece.
So it is. At the heart of the Olympics. But we don't see really. I mean, look, we used to 40 years ago we had stars like Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses, Jackie Joyner Kersey that were always, there were essentially celebrities that were always in the news, even in non Olympic years. The Olympics has got to figure out a way to get back to that. To take their major sports. Track. Swimming. Gymnastics. And maintain interest and build interest continuously. I mean, and look, we've seen there's all sorts of narrative storytelling out there.
Drive to survive with F1. The hard knocks series that HBO does with the NFL. Write these stories that dig into the athletes. And show the. You know, not just what happens at the event, but what happens in between events. What happens in terms of how athletes build up to in the case of the NFL? The drama of athletes. Getting to training camp and trying to make the team. There's no reason and every opportunity. And look, I'll also be honest with you that there's also significant challenges. One of the funny things about the Olympics.
You got to remember. Is that the Olympics, the athletes essentially show up, maybe the, maybe the national Olympic committees do some payments for those. But the Olympics do not actually pay their featured performers.
But. Moving forward. There's gotta be a way around that. To start to create structures so that the athletes and the games, national committees, the international committees, all had the same incentives. Building up the stories. That create the Olympics brand. Right. So track and field just can't pop in every four years swimming.
Can't just pop up every four years. The public has got to the American public and the public and other countries has got to have an opportunity. To learn about these athletes, get invested with these athletes. And you think. And look, one of the pushbacks I've gotten on this notion. Is that well, what happens if those key athletes don't make the team? And I think what you gotta do is you gotta just think through the drama of sports. If you are building up a portfolio of track athletes and you get to the point where they're in the they're competing for a spot on the team, some make it maybe one or two don't. These are great narratives. Right.
It's heartbreaking. And you might feel like you're losing something out in terms of a major brand, not being featured at the game. If a key athlete doesn't make the team. But the reality is you've got to think beyond just the Olympic games will always be the pinnacle. Right. This is where the, essentially the Superbowl where we see how well we're doing, where we see how all of society comes together to watch.
But you've got to think through also the value of the process and continually building. The brands. Okay. I will leave it here. The Olympic games, like I said are coming. We'll we'll hit our TV sets and extremely platforms as we get to the end of July and August. There's also a written piece to accompany the podcast on the fanalytics.substack.com. Dot com. And I will always, you know, Collect all the links at my. At my online home of fandom analytics.com. Thank you much