Paris Was a Marketing Warmup for Los Angeles Olympics and World Cup

Even as the Paralympics stretch the Paris Olympics hosting duties into September, Olympic brand sponsors are training for the next Games.

From ratings to sponsorships, the 2024 Summer Olympics were already the gold standard. The International Olympic Committee is on track to reach its $1.34 billion sponsorship revenue goal, according to research firm Ampere Analysis. And in the United States alone, NBCUniversal was on track to bring in more than $1.2 billion in Olympic advertising commitments. 

However, for bigger brands, the 2024 Paris Games were just the starting line for a sprint through big U.S. sports marketing events within the next year, including the 2026 North American World Cup, the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, and the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games.

“As we’ve seen during the Paris Olympics, brands often use major sporting events as a platform to promote other upcoming events, and this strategy has a long history,” said Vanessa Chin, svp of marketing for creative effectiveness platform System1. “The key to its effectiveness lies not only in the excitement and camaraderie generated by the initial event but also in how brands build upon previous campaigns to enhance brand fluency and create a strong emotional connection with their audience.”

For instance, using its Test Your Ad platform that ranks campaigns from 1.0 to 5.9 stars based on consumers’ emotional responses, System1 found Team USA sponsor Dick’s Sporting Goods’ “Big Moments Every Day” spot particularly effective for connecting the Games to moments of joy in childhood sports.

With Dick’s also serving as a Team USA sponsor for 2026 and 2028, embracing a broader and more connective theme beyond sports helps the company set a tone for campaigns to come. 

As brands including Eli Lilly, Visa, and Delta wind down their Paris Olympics and Paralympics campaigns, their universal messaging and foreshadowing put them at a competitive advantage for future sports spectacles.

“The Olympics remain one of the few great, unifying events in our increasingly fragmented media landscape, making them an ideal platform for launching broader global brand campaigns,” said Eric Dahan, founder of influencer creative and performance marketing agency Mighty Joy.

“While most people may not be deeply invested in most—if not all—of the individual Olympic sports, the ethos of the event as a whole resonates strongly with audiences through the universal themes of human achievement, perseverance, and pride.”

Post-Paris planning

Worldwide Olympic Partner Visa sponsored more than 145 Olympic and Paralympic athletes from more than 65 countries as part of its Team Visa initiative. Combined, they had a social media following of more than 45 million, according to SponsorUnited.

But its Olympic campaigns didn’t lock themselves into the Games. In the U.S., Visa’s logo served as background for the origin stories of Pharrell Williams, Visa-backed tennis star Iga Świątek, Visa-sponsored Olympic skateboarding bronze medalist Sky Brown, Visa Cash App RB Formula 1 driver Daniel Ricciardo, chef and entrepreneur Roy Choi, and artist/designer Gemma O’Brien. In Europe, its “Level Up Your Game” campaign showed content creators turning athletes’ motions into art and music—a concept that transfers easily to any sporting event.

They’re part of Visa’s strategy to use the campaigns and the events themselves as proving grounds for each event that follows—including a Visa-sponsored 2026 FIFA World Cup in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., and the 2028 L.A. Olympics, which it’s already teasing on social.

“Our sponsorship strategies have always focused on aligning ourselves with best-in-class properties: the NFL, FIFA, and Olympic Games,” said Andrea Fairchild, Visa’s svp of global sponsorships and marketing, just after the NFL’s Visa-sponsored Super Bowl in February. “We utilize other partnerships along the way to enable Visa to reinforce our products. We can’t do everything, but we’re much better when those partnerships and collaborations come together.”

Team USA sponsors have taken varied approaches to a similar issue. Eli Lilly signed on as Team USA’s prescription medicine and health equity partner through the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. Though it partnered with gymnast Sunisa Lee this year, Lilly’s “One Body” ad campaign focused on young athletes in Olympic sports without singling out Team USA or the Olympics themselves. Instead of presenting a story about their performance, the spot talks about the need to “fight like hell” for personal health.

Delta Air Lines, which SponsorUnited points out has increased sponsorships by 19% since 2022, is pouring $400 million into Team USA over an eight-year deal that stretches to LA28. While its initial 2024 Olympics ads relegated its planes to the background and focused on athletes’ journeys to Paris, it spent recent days focusing ads on Los Angeles and making its logo the centerpiece of the Olympic flag handover.

“In a noisy ecosystem where consumer attention is constantly being pulled in different directions, it’s crucial that brands who invested substantially in their partnership with the Olympics extend their messaging beyond the Olympics to ensure it sticks and their investment isn’t wasted,” Dahan said.

Ways to the World Cup

While System1’s Chin noted that Olympic sponsors’ forward-looking strategy can keep viewers and fans locked in over a longer period, Olympic brands don’t necessarily need to align campaigns perfectly to look ahead.

Global Olympic partner Anheuser-Busch InBev focused on Team USA in its U.S. Michelob Ultra campaigns but teased the 2026 World Cup in the brand’s Super Bowl spot with Lionel Messi and Jason Sudeikis earlier this year. Chin said there’s a chance that theme continues as the 2026 event draws closer. 

Just using familiar faces and a consistent story can help tie disparate events together. Frito-Lay brands Lay’s and Walkers brought in global soccer legends Thierry Henry and David Beckham for an ad during a UEFA Champions League match between Paris Saint-Germain and AC Milan in February featuring the players searching for more chips.

The “No Lay’s, no game” theme carried into subsequent ads for Walkers, where the continued use of Beckham and Henry made the campaign more memorable.

“With athletes, teams, and nations coming together on the world’s largest stages, ads that show human interactions (such as spoken and unspoken communications, knowing glances, and so on) through characters and devices develop emotions from viewers,” Chin said.

“This strategy of using one event to set up future promotions not only leverages the initial event’s excitement but also builds a cohesive brand narrative that can engage audiences over time.”