The TOP Programme — The Olympics of Global Corporations

As we saw in the previous episode, the 1984 Los Angeles Games struck two veins of gold: television broadcasting rights and sponsorship. The technique of narrowing sponsors down to a single company per industry, in particular, made firms pay handsomely in exchange for a guaranteed special status, and thus established the model of the commercial Olympics.

But this success had one limitation. The Los Angeles sponsorship contracts were, after all, arrangements centered on that one edition of the Games and on the host country. For multinational corporations operating around the world, having to start fresh negotiations every four years, and separately for each country, was extraordinarily cumbersome. So the IOC took a step toward a far grander vision: building a single sponsorship scheme that spanned the entire globe.

The one and only worldwide sponsorship scheme

The scheme was named ‘TOP’, an acronym for The Olympic Partner. The IOC is said to have launched it in 1985, with the first four years (1985–88) forming the initial cycle.

The mechanism of TOP was bold. For each industry — beverages, film, credit cards and so on — only a single company worldwide would be chosen as the ‘top-tier partner’. In return, the chosen firm gained the exclusive right to use the Olympic marks in its advertising at every Games around the world. It bundled country-by-country negotiations under a single umbrella — a kind of ‘unified global standard’ for Olympic marketing.

At the heart of the thinking behind this scheme, it is said, were people around Horst Dassler, who led commercialization within the IOC of that era, and specialist marketing companies. They systematized the intangible value the Olympics held — an image known to everyone in the world, drawing goodwill that transcended politics and religion — into an ‘asset’ that could be sold to corporations.

The five rings, the most recognized mark in the world

At the very root of what made TOP possible lay the overwhelming power of the Olympic symbol itself. The five rings — a mark said to have been devised by Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics — became, over the course of the twentieth century, one of the most widely recognized images in the world.

For corporations, these rings were something they craved. When trying to sell a single product across the whole world, the Olympic mark could instantly bestow a ‘common goodwill’ that reached every market, no matter how different its language and culture. Coca-Cola is known as a company that has been involved with the Olympics for a long time, ever since the 1928 Amsterdam Games, and it was listed among the partners from TOP’s founding era. In fields such as credit cards, photographic film and electronics as well, global companies representing their industries vied for that single slot.

What happened here might be called a reversal of value. Once, companies had been in the position of ‘supporting the Games’ by putting up money for the Olympics. But in the age of TOP, companies came instead to regard the very ability to use the Olympic mark as ‘an investment in their own brand’. It was not the Olympics that needed corporations, but corporations that craved the Olympic image — and that balance of power justified the enormous contract fees.

The battle against free riders — ambush marketing

A business that sells exclusivity has a fated enemy: companies that, without paying, behave as if they were official sponsors — so-called ‘ambush marketing’.

The IOC has treated this as a problem, regarding it as conduct that feigns an official relationship with the Olympics, or misleads consumers. A well-known example often cited is the 1996 Atlanta Games. A major sporting-goods company that was not an official sponsor mounted a large-scale advertising campaign around the venues, and it was reported that a considerable share of spectators came to believe ‘that company must be the official sponsor’. For the official sponsors who had paid a fortune, it was tantamount to being freeloaded upon.

Why was this so serious? The value of TOP rests entirely on ‘exclusivity’. If anyone could piggyback on the Olympic image with similar techniques, the point of paying a great deal of money for an official slot would fade. The very foundation of the scheme would be shaken.

In this way the Olympics transformed into not only a festival of competition but also one of the most valuable brands in the world. The five rings became a powerful symbol for selling products across borders, and TOP came to function as a grand mechanism for parceling out the right to use it among the world’s corporations.

The television money born of broadcasting rights, and the sponsorship money of global corporations bundled by TOP. When these two giant streams converged, the Olympics’ finances grew richer than ever before. And yet, wherever such wealth gathers in a single place, human greed is inevitably drawn there too. Who gains the seat of host city — the gateway to that wealth — and how? In the next episode, we will look at a certain affair that occurred at that gateway. For the money vast enough to draw the world’s corporations would also summon a deep darkness to the foot of the Games.