Syracuse

Olympic marketing can be traced all the way back to the very first modern Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, in 1896, where companies provided revenue by advertising in a souvenir programme, and sales of stamps and tickets helped to partially finance the venue construction. During the early years of the Olympic Movement, the focus of both the IOC and the Organising Committees for the Olympic Games (OCOGs) in particular was on generating enough revenue to cover costs, and on promoting the Games and protecting their unique status. For example, at Stockholm 1912, 10 Swedish companies purchased sole rights to take photographs and sell Olympic Games memorabilia, and at Amsterdam 1928 the OCOG covered 1.5 per cent of its expenditures with philatelic programme revenue.

Beginning in the early 1950s, the OCOGs and the IOC began to focus more on the development of marketing-related initiatives, with London 1948 being the first Olympic Games to establish the principle of broadcast rights fees, and Helsinki 1952 being the first to launch an international marketing programme (in which companies from 11 countries made contributions of goods and services, ranging from food for the athletes to flowers for the medallists).

The 1980s are recognised as the starting point of the evolution towards the Olympic marketing programmes that still exist today, with the creation in 1985 of The Olympic Partners (TOP) programme, the highest level of Olympic sponsorship, granting category-exclusive marketing rights to the Summer, Winter and Youth Olympic Games to a selected group of global partners. The first edition of the programme, TOP I, generated USD 95 million from nine worldwide partners. For Lillehammer 1994, broadcasting and marketing generated more than USD 500 million, breaking almost every major Olympic Winter Games marketing record.

The IOC and the organisations within the Olympic Movement are entirely privately funded and generate revenue through several programmes. The IOC manages broadcast partnerships, the TOP programme, and the IOC official supplier and licensing programme. The OCOGs manage domestic sponsorship, ticketing and licensing programmes within the host country, under the direction of the IOC. In addition, National Olympic Committees generate revenue through their own domestic commercial programmes.

In total, the revenue for the Olympiad spanning 2013 to 2016, covering the Olympic Winter Games Sochi 2014 and the Olympic Games Rio 2016, was USD 5.7 billion. Because the IOC is a non-profit organisation, 90 per cent of the revenues go straight back into sport and athlete development, meaning that every day the equivalent of over USD 3.4 million is distributed to support athletes and sports organisations at all levels around the world.

If you are interested in how Olympic marketing has evolved since its beginnings or wish to analyse marketing initiatives for a particular Games edition or from a particular angle, we have compiled for you a selection of the most important publications (including the marketing reports for each edition of the Games and marketing fact files to find the most up-to-date information and figures on the various programmes), as well as an extensive list of links and a wide range of academic works.

To get a good overview of this topic, we recommend reading “The gold in the rings: the people and events that transformed the Olympic Games” by Stephen R. Wenn and Robert K. Barney, “Olympic Marketing: historical overview” by Josep Maria Puig and “Comprehensive review of Olympic Movement marketing” by Hossein Eydi and Hamed Farzi.

This page contains just a selection of the resources available on this topic in the Olympic World Library, so be sure to check out the full list of resources via the link at the bottom of the page, or search in the full catalogue for other topics of interest.