An Olympic Brand Battle 🇺🇸

Sports marketing should be its own sport at the Olympics. There is a behind-the-scenes battle that is happening amongst all the brands, and it can be really entertaining if you pay attention.

First? Some groundwork. Brands are allowed to sponsor athletes and/or countries, across many different sports. It gets very confusing.
Using the USA as an example, our fastest men’s sprinter, Noah Lyles, is sponsored by Adidas. But USA Track and Field is sponsored by Nike while USA golf is sponsored by J. Lindenberg.

Athletes are required to wear the team uniform in their apparel, but they can choose their own footwear, often the footwear of their sponsor. This gets challenging for Brands, because you want show off the athlete you sponsor, but you don't want to show off your competition.

There are creative ways to get around this.
Option 1: If you're an official sponsor, you can brief an AP photographer or an Associated Press photographer. But there's no guarantee to get the shot that you want. They’ll keep it in mind, but aren’t generally trained for this.
Option 2: the flag draping over the uniform is usually a great way to cover a competing sponsor. Michael Jordan perfected this, and I have to wonder if atheltes are encouraged (but not required) to do this by the big brands 🤔 
Below would have been a great asset for Nike…

This is the best they got apparently, but he has his bib covering the Nike swoosh here.

Adidas has probably done the best job at this game in these games…

Option 3: Pick images that intentionally cover the Nike swoosh for their athletes.

The image above is a particularly great example of just using the athlete's motion to cover his logo.
And the image below is a grey area. You're not allowed to photoshop out logos, but they've used their previously established visual overlay to treat this. Clever.

New Balance seems to not care at all.

While Oakley got a particularly great example here covering the team Nike logo, getting an awesome shot of both of these sprinters in their glasses.

But then they decided to show Trinity Rodman and two competing logos in their win ad for the USWNT!

After feeling so patriotic, and realizing it’s an election year... I hereby propose the brands to lay down their battle weapons and do a collaborative post to celebrate team victories.

It could remind all of us Americans that we’re better together than we are apart. Let’s remember that as we head into this election year!


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