The brand that did best out of the Olympics wasn’t even a sponsor

Tim Horton’s won the gold medal for Olympic advertisers

Its ad featuring the immigrant family reuniting was rated the gold medal ad during the Olympics by Marketing Magazine readers.

Tim Hortons is second only to the Bay in terms of awareness of who are sponsors (Angus Reid Poll reported in Globe and Mail print edition Saturday Feb 27). And yet they are not even a sponsor.

Olympic sponsorship doesn’t come cheap. Sponsors paid a total of nearly $1bn to VANOC for the rights to be a sponsor Bell alone spent $200 million and RBC $110 million.

Are they getting value? Most aren’t.

I’ve sat through several post Olympics research evaluations. I was struck by two things.

Firstly only a few sponsors even get noticed. There are so many sponsors; 8 international partners, 6 national partners, 9 official supporters, 22 official suppliers, and 2 media partners. Only 3 or 4 get widely noticed. And this year it seems The Bay, Tim Horton’s and Bell are topping the list (see Angus Reid Poll mentioned).

You have to spend a lot on top of your sponsorship on advertising and the like to ensure your brand gets credit and even then it’s not assured.

Secondly companies hope to get some of the great values of the Olympics to transfer to their brand. The Olympics are the world’s biggest sporting event; the best athletes in the world go; it is both the coming together of nations and the celebration of patriotism; it is about passion, commitment and human achievement. It is the fastest, highest and fastest. These more than outweigh the blemishes on the games’ reputation so who wouldn’t want that for their brand?

However few of these values transfer to the sponsors. In fact the only thing that automatically transfers is stature. The Olympics is the world’s biggest and only big successful companies like Coke and McDonalds are associated with the Olympics, so as a sponsor you must be successful. Thus Samsung gains more stature than LG, RBC than TD. Roots got immediate credibility from their link to the Games back in Nagano back in 1998.

The rest is up to how you market the association.

Some companies try to inject some the humanity of the Olympics into their brand image. They use individual atheletes they’ve supported, their employees or cuddly characters. Examples include Rona and RBC this year, Home Depot and Petro Canada in 2008 and Bell with its beavers in 2006.

A less used approach is to draw parallels between the skill and precision that goes into manufacturing your brand and what the athletes do. The Mint took that approach this year, and Chrysler took a similar theme back in Nagano, 1998.

However, the most popular approach seems to be to attach your brand to Canadianness. So you build brand affinity with your target through shared pride in our country. Brands that are doing this for these Games include Samsung, McDonalds, Coke, Loblaws, Tim Horton's and Molson.

Some of these backfire dramatically as far as I am concerned. Coke says “This (hockey) is our game”. Well it may that as Canadians we think of hockey that way, but you Coke are not Canadian and it is not your game. I feel the same about Samsung and McDonalds claiming Canadian citizenship. They are world brands. Claiming to be Canadian is carpetbagging.

Loblaws is a Canadian company and so has the right to use the flag. But their claiming of even a small part of the credit for the athletes’ performance chaffs, especially when linked to their Blue Menu. I guess I’m not supposed to take it literally but I can’t see athletes eating Blue Menu products. It doesn’t help that the skiers, who they featured have not done well this year. Perhaps they should have stuck to unprocessed food.

On the other hand Molson says they are “Made from Canada”. This works for me. One advantage of this is it builds on a long term brand strategy and it is a Canadian brand. Even the name helps.

The Bay also works. The Olympic sponsorship seems to have allowed them to rediscover their Canadian roots after years of ignoring them. This makes me feel good about them as a brand. And the gear they’ve designed is way cooler than I’d have expected from the Bay.

But this is the area where Tim Horton’s really wins.

Their ad doesn’t mention the Olympics but taps into the patriotic feelings that the Games generate. What’s more important is that a key part of their brand is about Canadianness and has been for many years. It feels natural for them and so people associate them with the national pride of the Olympics.

It is a great, memorable ad which taps into a brand truth and that is why they get the gold medal for me.

The lesson for other sponsors? Ask yourself will people notice your efforts and transfer positive values to your brand. And ask yourself, do I need to be a sponsor to get those benefits?

Like the games themselves it is a competition. You are up against the best in the world many of whom will have deeper pockets. If your efforts are less than outstanding you will be lost amongst the non-medal finishers and see little return. If you can’t match up to the Tim Horton’s of this world, save your money and don’t bother with the Games.

#4 Man as a Pack Animal - The Importance of Fame.

In marketing we pride ourselves on targeting. Of finding and focussing on the people who may become buyers. We dismiss everything else as wasteage. But is it?

But what about the people who never will? There is growing evidence that people who will never buy our brand are important as well.

Jeremy Bullmore argues persuasively that “about the only thing that successful brands have in common is a kind of fame”.

Famous people are known by millions of people. By the same token “a brand, if it is to enjoy genuine celebrity, must be known to a circle of people that far exceeds what we in the business so chillingly call its target group”.

Part of this is people’s desire to be conformist; to do what everyone else does. This is a powerful drive. Social psychologists have found people will say black is white if other people say it first.

IPSOS have found a similar process in consumer decision making. Popularity is a major driver of the success of brands. They conclude that there is security in numbers. They use Robert Cialdini’s “Social Proof” concept to explain it: “by observing other people doing something or by knowing that others are also buying a certain product creates positive psychological factors influencing the same thing”. (Gimme! The Human Nature of Successful Marketing by John Hallward)

But that only works if your brand is widely known.

The other reason is that as pack animals what we know about a brand isn’t all that influences our buying decision. What other people think matters as well – even people who have never bought the brand in question. As Jeremy Bullmore so eloquently puts it “what’s the point of your driving about in a £50,000 BMW if 95% of us peasants don’t realize how successful you must be to own one”.

All this argues for the value of advertising your brand broadly in a “spectacularly untargeted” way. Creating a brand perception amongst a broad target will influence those people who may end up buying it.

Turning 50

A friend of mine turned 50 the other day. Another announced his retirement at 60 – though he has only retired to start a consultancy. And I'm in my mid 50s.

It got me to thinking. When I started in this business I asked what happened to people when they reached 40 – definitely old in my view then. They opened pubs and wine bars was the best response anyone could give me.

Advertising was and still largely is a young person’s profession. Other professions value the wisdom that comes with age but advertising isn’t one of them. Advertising values energy and creativity, two things believed to be associated with youth.

This isn’t necessarily true – the Economist for example identifies the creativity of “Late Bloomers”.

However it is still widely believed in the industry that youth rules.

And advertising puts little value on accumulated knowledge – one reason for the paucity of training programs in the industry.

It certainly makes me very aware of being over 50. And judging by the way some people my age in advertising dress and cut their hair I am not alone.

One result is I hate those ads on my Facebook page offering deals to those over 50.

(Don’t get me started on online “targeting”. You do not know me just because you have some data on me. I am not a number. I am a free man)

But things may be changing. As we boomers approach retirement with our amassed wealth (I wish) we become an important target and these young people just don’t get it. I don’t know who did the Grey Power ad but it wasn’t aimed at people like me and I’ll bet they’re too young to buy Grey Power.

As Rick Mercer perceptively notes the sub-text is that Grey Power customers are past it and that’s not me.

I’m equally sure that the people who wrote these next two ads – one for Sony Camcorders and one for Red Meat are. Of course, someone will tell me I’m wrong and they were written by 20 year olds but until then I’ll continue with my belief that people like me are still needed.

Sony Camcorder

Red Meat


If anyone knows how to make these images clickable please let me know. Thanks