Olympic branding

The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing—you can’t escape it. From personal brands of individual athletes, nationalism vs. internationalism, political confrontation to international branding efforts of the world’s most well known companies, the Olympics is becoming a playground for all things brand.

We dove into our Olympic branding topic from a viewer’s perspective and debated NBC Universal’s broadcast strategy. We also predicted how NBC plans to leverage their post game analytics to their favor after all; they did pay $894 million to the IOC for the television rights to the Summer Games.

Once we debated NBC’s strategy (and had a quick laugh from our man-on-the-street interviews), we quickly moved on to examining the strategies and creative behind some of the top 2008 Summer Game sponsors.

Nike, one brand of much on-air conversation, is using the Summer Games to accomplish two goals in one swoosh (yes, we said it). Nike launched a new campaign, timed with the opening ceremony of the games, in an effort to incorporate global sports figure with their brand. At the same time Nike is also celebrating the 20th anniversary of their iconic slogan “Just Do It.”

Through our examination of the International Olympic Committees (IOC) top-tier sponsors we also covered branding campaigns from Anheuser-Busch. While we questioned A&B’s U.S. television campaign strategy (we believe it touts “American” too much post InBev acquisition) we are interested to see if their efforts specific to China will be fruitful post Olympics.

Coca-Cola is another brand that we could not have gone without mentioning. After all, they have been involved with the IOC since 1928.

Of course, an Olympic brand review could not go without a glance at McDonald’s. We had to ask: What is up with their strategy on the U.S. side?

While we’ve given you a quick teaser to half the show, we aren’t going to give away the farm. We encourage you to download the show for the rest of the scoop.

…And if for whatever reason you have not tuned into the 2008 Summer Games, we encourage you to “Just Do It!”