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Panel envisions sponsors’ role in technology future, fan experience at Games

On the seventh day of the Pyeongchang Winter Games, SportsBusiness Journal Olympics writer Ben Fischer and GMR Marketing convened a roundtable of senior Olympic leaders and corporate partners at the Golden Tulip Skybay Hotel in Gangneung, South Korea. The group took stock of both the current Games and the strategic issues facing the Olympics during a time of rapid technological changes.

Participants were Discovery’s Michelle Russo, GMR’s Adam Lippard, GE’s Chris Katsuleres, Christian Voigt of the IOC and former Olympic hockey player and outgoing IOC executive board member Angela Ruggiero.

 

From left, Adam Lippard of GMR Marketing, GE’s Chris Katsuleres, Discovery’s Michelle Russo, former Olympic hockey player and outgoing IOC member Angela Ruggiero and the IOC’s Christian Voigt sat down for a discussion after the first week of the Pyeongchang Games.mariana massey / getty images

A week into the Games, how are things going in Pyeongchang?

RUSSO: I think it’s going well by all measures. The Pyeongchang Organizing Committee has been great to work with, and the IOC and Olympic Broadcasting Services. Our clients are having a great time that we’re hosting here, so knock on wood, things are off to a good start.

 

LIPPARD: I would say it’s been a very unique Olympics. Certainly, Pyeongchang has presented, both in the planning and the activation, a series of challenges. First and foremost is how remote we all are. Contextually speaking, the size of our b‑to‑b programs has been smaller. That said, once here, once you’re in operational mode, things have been good. The topography and the geography, just within the two Olympic clusters, creates challenges.

 

Views On The Ground At The Winter Games

The Olympics experts who gathered in Pyeongchang for a mid-Games assessment:

Chris Katsuleres

Director, Olympic Marketing & Sports Programs, GE (an IOC sponsor)

Adam Lippard

Head of Global Sports & Entertainment Consulting, GMR Marketing

Angela Ruggiero

CEO & Co-Founder, Sports Innovation Lab

Outgoing member, IOC executive board

Michelle Russo

Executive Vice President, Global Communications, Discovery

Christian Voigt

Vice President of Marketing Development, IOC

I think everybody who’s probably reading this is very aware of the wind, and the impact that the wind has had on the competition schedule, and that obviously puts operational complexity in each day for our programs.

 

But I think, as we sit here today, given what the geopolitical landscape looked like in the fall … and then the uniting of North and South Korea, and all the positive that has come out of that, we’re sitting here against the backdrop of a really unique story.

 

VOIGT: We actually got, I think, really lucky on the opening ceremony because it was much colder the days before, and we had a really nice opening ceremony that actually even heads of states attended until the very end. So that was good.

 

RUGGIERO: I would just say from an athlete’s perspective, four Games as an athlete, four Games now as an IOC member, I’m impressed from an athlete’s perspective. What I’ve heard is the athletes are super happy with the venues. Of course, you can’t control the weather, so that’s been difficult on that end, but otherwise I think the athletes are happy.

 

KATSULERES: I think the Koreans have been good partners from a delivery standpoint. Our technology that we’ve got deployed here has gone well. I think we’ve had some small hiccups along the way. We went into this with modest expectations, compared to past Games, with what we were going to do from an activation standpoint and a hospitality standpoint.

 

One thing I’ve noticed that’s lacking a little bit here is kind of a vibe. You see it in pockets, but maybe if you go into the park you don’t see kind of that atmosphere.

 

VOIGT: Depends on the events, right? I thought yesterday’s halfpipe was actually quite exciting, to see the cheers and the atmosphere there.

 

KATSULERES: Part of it, too, Christian, is you’ve got some empty seats, and I think that’s hopefully something the organizing committee is working on as far as trying to get people into the venues.

 

LIPPARD: The weather, not just the wind, but the temperatures, impacts people’s desire to be outside. There’s a real impact to that, I think, to the outdoor energy, non‑competition outdoor energy.

 

I think the running theme to the last 18 months was there wasn’t much enthusiasm overall in this country for it. Just walking around the towns and the cities, how does it rate?

KATSULERES: I think having everything up here [in Pyeongchang] has made it a little bit more challenging. It’s difficult for people to get up here. Even those that do want to come up from Seoul, you look at the KTX [train], they’re fully booked. There’s no way to get up here other than taking buses or private cars, and that’s just an inherent challenge.

 

With the size of the host city in Pyeongchang and Gangneung, has this gotten to the point that would make the IOC think twice about taking it to a resort location instead of a city again?

VOIGT: It’s the nature of the Olympic Games that we want to have it in many places, but you look here and how they are able to pull it off, and you look at the road ahead, you look at Tokyo, Beijing, Paris and L.A. down the road, I think we feel pretty comfortable the locations are going to be in major metropolitan areas.

 

LIPPARD: We’re the .001 percent or less of the people that are experiencing the Olympic Games in the home market. [Most people see] the prime-time television show that is produced every night, in all its pageantry and glory, and the rights-holding partners do and have done in this Games a fantastic job on the presentation.

 

RUSSO: One of the things we advocated and worked very closely with POCOG to deliver is a mobile studio that we have going around to the venues. It’s never been done before in an Olympic Games, and to capture that atmosphere and the crowd and the spirit, and we’re putting out short-form content every night just to engage people and let them see the exciting moments and how the crowd is reacting and capturing that, the specialness of Korea as a destination as well as the stories behind the Olympic achievements.

 

SBJ Olympics reporter Ben Fischer (left) leads the panel at the Golden Tulip Skybay Hotel.mariana massey / getty images

How does all this technology and the connectivity come to bear? We know that it’s here in ways that weren’t in the past. But running around day to day, it’s easy to not appreciate the gains.

VOIGT: Well, I think one thing we’re enthusiastic about is the collaboration among our commercial partners, whether it’s Discovery Eurosport, or NBC as we mentioned, and on the TOP side with Intel and Samsung. One concrete example is 30 live events in VR. That is something to that extent has not been done before, and I think that’s quite exciting. And then Intel, the other example, is maybe in collaboration with KT and also Samsung, they were experimenting and showcasing the first 5G, which that’s the starting point, and that will be the future, and it will be really exciting of what’s to come in Tokyo.

 

LIPPARD: Intel, I think, is a fantastic example of someone who’s doing it in the here and now. I’m not sure that there’s been a bigger sort of off‑the‑field story, off‑the‑field‑of‑play story than the drone technology and the integration into the opening ceremony, but you sort of contrast that with the reality of 5G, which is not here. You contrast that with how Alibaba is presenting through their brain metaphor, show what the future of the Olympics can become.

 

So you’ve got those brands that are really innovating in real time based on where the technology is, and those brands that are forecasting the future, which many people believe will sort of come into fruition first in Tokyo. That’s why the IOC does eight‑year deals.

 

But this gets much more complicated to manage, doesn’t it?

RUGGIERO: You see on the TOP side, roughly half our partners now are technology providers; even Toyota is a mobility solution rather than a car. The categories are changing. Who would have thought cloud would be a category a few years ago? There’s an explosion of categories themselves, and then delivery, which I think is the biggest change. Typically, consumer goods companies are buying the brand and you’re activating separately, and now we’re seeing that crossover between sponsorship and activation and delivery, really, at the end of the day.

 

As you redefine what you need for the delivery of the Games, you can actually open up and create new categories within the Olympic movement.

 

Chris, GE has been doing this for a while now. In that, by definition, what communicating about your role in the Games is more complicated than a McDonald’s or a Coca‑Cola. How do you go about doing that?

KATSULERES: I think we’ve looked at it as where GE solutions can make an impact on the Games’ delivery. It’s based on, “How operationally can you make the Games more efficient and better for athletes?” It’s not tech for tech’s sake, it’s based on a true insight, a true need, and find where we can add value, and really that’s the backbone of our overall kind of reason for being involved with the Olympics. All of our storytelling comes off the back of that.

 

A good example is what we’re doing with electronic medical records. Up until really Rio, it was about an archaic system where athletes were filling out paper forms to provide critical information for the physicians to treat them. Now it’s all electronic.

 

Christian, this new day of more complex solutions‑oriented sponsorship and partnership, how has it changed the IOC’s work?

VOIGT: I think the one thing that changed a little bit, actually, is that we’ve become a bit more fan-centric. You wouldn’t have had too many presentations in the past where it started with the fan and the experience. That’s what’s happening right now, and that’s going to be the future in everything we do.

 

As you add these solutions and technological partners, they get closer to each other’s exclusive areas of marketing rights. Is it correct to say that figuring out how they work together without stepping on each other’s rights is a question that takes up more time today?

VOIGT: It does take more of the mindshare, and we have to become, and we are now becoming, more proactive in managing it. I think our team has grown threefold in the last five years, and so it’s an amazing amount of staff that you need to manage it. But I just also want to be very clear: We have very clear categories in all of our contracts, and while we allow flexibility on the activation side, actually we are very, very clear on how partners interact and come into the TOP program.

 

We will have new categories. Some will go away. We’re actively looking at the program, who is a strategic fit, who will help us and how can we help friends tell their story and have them tell it with us.

 

RUGGIERO: I think one challenge, though, is the new categories, because if you’re extending deals 10, 12 years, there are these emerging categories. I believe there’s going to be conflicts literally every single year that are emerging because of new technology and the solutions that come with that.

 

VOIGT: We always look at what kind of product or service contribution our partners make to certain bigger technological concepts, and that’s how we balance that out. And yes, there will be new categories that just pop up that we didn’t think of yesterday. We’ll have to have that flexibility to have people collaborate, and that’s how our deals are structured.

 

KATSULERES: They can coexist, and I think there’s certainly a spirit amongst the partners to try to find that level of collaboration. But sometimes a hard decision has to be made, and that’s where we look to Christian and his team to kind of help us with that. I think the days of how it was, hey, everybody had their clear streams and that was it; those days are gone.

 

RUSSO: It’s our first endeavor as a partner of the IOC, but we have found that they want us to push them on certain things. They’ll tell us where the lines are, but then we’ll try to push against them, and in general the IOC has been very supportive and not just a big bureaucracy that’s impossible to navigate.

 

LIPPARD: Where I think cooperation and collaboration may run directly into conflict is through advanced app technology. Take the notion of driving broadcast, [financial tech], customer experience and VR through a single killer app for the Olympics. I think that pulls on virtually every single brand, every single category, and today the app technology for the Olympics is an opportunity for great improvement.

 

KATSULERES: I think one interesting part to this whole dialogue here is where the organizing committees fit in this whole process, because you’ve got to look at their time horizon relative to your vision. Some of these things are things that you want to build to grow and step by step get better, but the organizing committees oftentimes are looking at it from a shorter lens.

 

RUGGIERO: It’s a really interesting point because all the stakeholders have different timelines, different perspectives, different needs. The athletes are like, “Give me what’s relevant today.” The broadcasters are saying, “I want to reach my fans, I want to engage my audiences in a stadium at home.” The sponsors have activation strategies. In a way, the Olympics are a microcosm of society. You have to work together.

 

The Pyeongchang Games have been a hit, according to the panel.getty images

Are we putting as much effort into improving the live experience as we are the viewing experience? Because I feel like there’s a lot of revenue to be unlocked if you can make it a happier experience to be here.

VOIGT: It’s in the background. It’s a digital experience that will add to the live experience, and we’re working on that journey as we speak. You’ve got to give us a little bit of time because these planning processes are always … seven years.

 

RUGGIERO: The biggest thing I see is the Olympics have this seven‑year planning phase. You have to adopt the technology you want far in advance and have the right partnerships. That’s, I think, going to be the biggest struggle for the Olympic Games is the fact that you have such a long planning process, yet the fans are going to demand the same experience, if not better, than you get at a professional football game where they’re constantly experimenting and moving new technologies through. They have a model where they’re leveraging data and they know their fan intimately, whereas here they might be meeting you for the first time.

 

VOIGT: Almost nowhere is there more pressure to bring the show on the highest level, and that’s why there’s the difficulty of not having that stadium 365 days a year. I think it’s much easier if you own that franchise.

 

KATSULERES: In comparison to all the innovation that’s going into the broadcast side, if we go into any of these venues, the operation of the on‑site experience is more or less what it was back in Vancouver.

 

LIPPARD: The short answer … is I don’t think the on‑site fan experience has had the same rigor and innovation that the broadcast viewing experience has had. But it’s in the works, and so many of these partners are so focused in on that. But going back to an earlier point, the number of people that would then experience that innovation compared to the numbers of people who are experiencing the broadcast innovation is tiny.

 

RUGGIERO: But don’t you think if you’re able to demonstrate with the Olympic platform that capability, you could talk about that? And then take that to the real market?

 

LIPPARD: Yeah, if you could do it here, you could do it anywhere, and that’s sort of the point.

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