As Paris prepares to host this year’s Olympic Games—with the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe looming as backdrops—Coca-Cola Company, a longtime IOC partner, is gearing up to cultivate relationships and entertain clients on a grand scale.
At the 2012 London Olympics, Coca-Cola hosted nearly 4,000 guests from more than 100 countries as part of its corporate hospitality program, providing them with tickets and experiences. After Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo that had more limited hospitality potential, the 96-year IOC partner is expected to bring almost 2,000 guests to Paris, wooing them with tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies, gold-medal events and more.
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“In the 2000s the hospitality industry was changing. It became less about formal hospitality and more [about an] informal environment, conducive to networking,” Alan Gilpin—the former CEO of Prestige Ticketing, the official hospitality provider of the London Games, and current CEO of World Rugby—said in a video call. “Our experience for London 2012 was that people saw it as a huge opportunity to have a very special shared experience with a client or a potential client. And I think businesses really understood that.”
The London Games set a high bar for hospitality. Eleven million tickets were sold for the 2012 Summer Olympics, according to a report from the London Assembly, which scrutinizes the activities of the Mayor of London. Of those 11 million, 90,000 were designated for VIP hospitality, which Prestige managed.
But the two subsequent Summer Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, were understated when it comes to hospitality. Rio de Janeiro faced threats from the Zika virus, while Tokyo was postponed a year and held with no spectators due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
“COVID was a great reminder of the value of live sport events” for networking and entertaining clients and potential clients, Gilpin said.
As of May 2024, the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee said ticket sales had set records, with nearly 9 million already being snapped up. A representative from On Location, the official hospitality provider of the Olympics, said people from more than 120 countries have bought hospitality packages, and they plan to welcome “tens of thousands of hospitality guests per day in Paris.” That number is up from “low tens of thousands” from previous Games, the representative said.
Hospitality tickets don’t come cheap. Opening Ceremony tickets offered through On Location for boats moored on the Seine River where the ceremony will take place are offered at $8,120 (€7500). This package includes a cocktail-style dinner with specially selected champagne and live music. For the closing ceremony at the Stade de France on Aug. 11, prices for the packages range from $2,340 (€2,150) to $5,170 (€4,750) with catering and entertainment.
“In the next decade, we’re poised to witness corporate sponsorship hospitality return to the levels seen during the London Olympics 12 years ago,” said Ricardo Fort, founder of Sport by Fort consulting, who led global sports partnerships for Visa during the 2012 Games.
“Going to Paris is like going to Disneyland a week before Christmas,” he continued. “Prices are skyrocketing. Many sponsors can’t bring as many guests as they’d like, because the cost per hospitality package is very high.”
Tim Dignard, the director of global sports partnerships and operations at The Coca-Cola Company, said his team has been planning its corporate hospitality program for at least two years.
“Our hospitality program is there to help just like our partnership with the IOC,” Dignard said in a video call. “The Olympics and Paralympics are great platforms. We do so much for athletes, which is key for us. But at the end of the day, we also look at this and see how this can help the business grow.”
They surveyed potential guests they would bring to Paris to understand what events they might want to see. Over the course of the Olympics’ 17 days, they will break the group into five sections, where 400 or so people will arrive in Paris at a different time.
“Some will see the opening ceremony, some will see the gold medal events, and some will be there for the closing,” he said. “The closing can be significant for people, because that’s the big hand over [to the next Olympics].”
In addition to offering the best seats at the Games, Dignard and his team put together an experience package for Coca-Cola’s guests, including cruises on the Seine, visiting famous Parisian catacombs, a private tour of the Opera Garnier and a visit to Fragonard Perfume Museum, where they can create their own fragrances. The company will also host a food fest celebrating cuisines from around the world.
Partnering with the IOC provides companies an opportunity to engage with a vast global audience, enhance their brand image and achieve marketing and business objectives. Coca-Cola experienced that nearly a century ago. During the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, the first Games when Coca-Cola was an IOC partner, the company brought cases of Coke on a boat carrying U.S. athletes. At the time, Coca-Cola did not have a footprint in that part of Europe; the company started bottling operations in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg in 1947, and Switzerland, Italy and France by 1949.
IOC’s Olympic partners (TOP) program provides each company with marketing rights and opportunities within an industry based on the exclusivity, meaning no other brand of the same sector will be granted partnerships, according to research from Schroeder School of Business at the University of Evansville in Indiana. The TOP program, introduced during the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, became increasingly lucrative for brands as broadcast audiences grew.
But an IOC partnership is costly. According to the IOC, TOP agreements generally amount to around $400 million per four-year period, although figures can vary significantly based on the specific categories and level of competition. Typically spanning eight to 10 years, these contracts cover four to five Olympic Games, both summer and winter. In addition to Coca-Cola, companies such as P&G, Allianz, Omega, Samsung, Visa and Toyota are longtime IOC partners.
Despite their privileges, these brands still will likely spend hundreds of thousands entertaining clients in Paris, based on the costs of the hospitality packages available to the public.
“You can create around-the-clock programming where the Olympic events are a part of the best restaurants and best cultural sites in the world,” Harry Poole, vice president of marketing solutions at Excel Sports Management, told Sportico in a video call. “It’s a bucket list item for anybody.”
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