The concerns still dominate.
In the middle of the next corona wave, which Japan has been in control for about a month, the Olympic Games in Tokyo will officially open on Friday.
But while the companies in Japan are distancing themselves from the games in view of the negative attitude of a large part of the population and are sharply reducing their advertising activities, the international advertising market appears unimpressed.
TV broadcasters report that the slots are fully booked, and advertising managers have hardly seen any negative effects so far.
Despite all the criticism, business is going well.
Patrick Welter
Correspondent for business and politics in Japan, based in Tokyo.
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Gustav Theile
Editor in business.
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The sums involved are enormous. The US broadcaster NBC alone, which broadcasts the games in the United States, had made $ 1.2 billion (about 1 billion euros) from Olympic advertising by June, as the broadcaster announced. This means that the mark was already exceeded by the games in Rio in 2016. ARD, ZDF and Eurosport are also reporting great interest: the available advertising space is almost or completely booked out. "What happens in communication and campaigns around the Olympics is more than ever before," says Claudia Wagner of the FAZ, who, as managing director of Deutsche Sport Marketing, a subsidiary of the German Olympic Sports Confederation, is responsible for the marketing of the Olympics in Germany. It was only on Monday that she announced a new partnership with the US technology company Salesforce.
Overall, the global advertising market, which is estimated at around 650 billion dollars (550 billion euros), increases by around 1 percent every four years, when the European football championships, the summer games and US presidential elections usually take place one after the other, says Sir Martin Sorrell in conversation with the FAZ The Briton once built up the world's largest advertising group, WPP, where he went into strife after controversies and is now preparing to turn the advertising market upside down with his company S4 Capital.
The advertising coffers are full
According to Sorrell, one of his customers is the International Olympic Committee (IOC) itself. The corona pandemic, which last year caused the global advertising market to decline by around 10 percent and postpone the Olympic Games and the European Championship, is now making it difficult to assess this effect. But the big events come at a good time for the advertising market: Companies are advertising more again because of the economic recovery, and there are catch-up effects because budgets that were postponed during lockdown months are now being spent. There are estimates that the advertising market will grow by around 14 percent this year - if the pandemic does not come back with force in Western countries.
“The greatest risk is the unpredictability of the competitions: How many cases of infection will there be? How much will these be discussed in public? ”Warns Florian Adamski. “Will there be individual athletes or entire associations that distance themselves? Will there be protest movements on site? ”With OMD, Adamski heads the world's largest media agency, which belongs to the WPP competitor Omnicom and controls the use of advertising budgets for advertisers.
In addition to the pandemic, the industry is also worried about comments from athletes. The pictures of Cristiano Ronaldo, who put Coca-Cola bottles out of his field of view during the European Championship and asked the audience to drink water, went around the world. The fact that the IOC now allows political expressions and gestures by athletes in a narrow framework leads to new risks, says advertising manager Sorrell. The Coca-Cola corporation, which is also one of the main Olympic sponsors, left the question of whether measures had been taken to prevent a similar incident during the Games unanswered upon request. Instead, a spokeswoman referred to planned digital marketing activities in Japan.