Programmatic is drawing more brands to this year’s Winter Olympics

Events like the Olympic Games used to be the preserve of the industry’s largest advertisers. But since NBCU began allowing brands to buy Olympic ad inventory via programmatic means two years ago for the summer Paris games, one of sports media’s crown jewels is accessible for brands with smaller budgets. 

Ad units against this year’s Milan-Cortina games are available via Amazon DSP, FreeWheel, Viant, The Trade Desk, Yahoo and NBCU. According to documents seen by Digiday, Olympic cost-per-thousand (CPMs) for 30-second units on Peacock range as low as $40 for non-live footage, to as high as $75 for live footage with targeting applied.

That would place Winter Olympic inventory at the high end of streaming ad prices, but it means advertisers without budgets stretching into the millions of dollars can claim a small piece of the action (the average streaming CPM on Disney+, for example, was $28.82 last year).

Though the majority of inventory will have been arranged through direct deals with NBCU during last summer’s TV upfront schedule, advertisers wielding smaller budgets are using programmatic access points to exploit the opportunity; mostly they’re doing so through private marketplace (PMP) deals, with a few using open exchange.

“Although this isn’t the first time that Olympics inventory will be available programmatically, the amount of inventory and DSPs who can access that inventory continues to grow, allowing more advertisers to run their messaging in the Olympics than ever before,” said Abby McNally, group director, connections strategy at media agency Collective Measures.

For All-Clad, that’s a major opportunity. The business wants to increase its brand awareness amid a dicey economy. Last year, it began investing in streaming TV ads on Amazon Prime and Fire TV for the first time, during the run-up to Thanksgiving, which Sandkvist said is the category’s “Super Bowl.”

The chance to take advantage of a normally gated-off live sports event was one she didn’t want to miss. “If you don’t have brand recall and you don’t have a relationship with your consumer, it is very hard today to grow,” she said.

Chris Conetta, head of supply, buyer services at Amazon Ads, said All-Clad wasn’t the only SMB advertiser breaking into Olympics advertising this year. “Live events, especially [for] performance-driven marketers, is the new frontier,” he said.

Conetta declined to provide specific figures regarding Olympic ad spend on the Amazon DSP so far this year, but said that demand was “healthy.”

The Winter Games’ favorable time difference with the U.S. viewing market — only six hours ahead of New York, versus the 13 and 14 hour lags between the east coast and the 2022 and 2018 games, held in China and South Korea respectively — means it’s also proving attractive for brands with larger budgets.

Among the usual suspects — companies like Hyundai, Ring and Hims & Hers, which already run ads against football and basketball coverage — are newcomers like outerwear brand Arc’teryx.

The Canadian brand is set to make not just its first ever Olympic advertising appearance but its first U.S. linear TV buy for the winter games. “TV typically has just not been part of our mix,” said Mark McCambridge, vp of global brand creative at Arc’teryx. To date, he explained, the company has had a keener focus on paid search, social and out of home.

But with the Winter Olympics providing a rare spotlight on mountain sports, he said it was worth changing course. “The U.S. is a really key focused market for us,” said McCambridge. “There’s a broader audience of people who are going to focus on sport at this moment.” 

The campaign isn’t as great a milestone for Arc’teryx as it is for All-Clad; parent firm Amer Sports, which also owns ski brand Salomon, saw third quarter operating profits increase 22% to $216 million last year. But it’s still a big moment. While All-Clad’s spot leans on American-made credentials and nods at the competitiveness driving Olympians, the outerwear firm’s ad instead emphasizes the quiet, zen-like moments found amid the excitement. Its hero film shows snowboarder Spencer O’Brian in slow motion mid-turn, set to a Brian Eno track; McCambridge said it took 65 takes to get just right.

“We’re trying to pull people into the awareness that the mountains are a larger idea than just skiing down an icy slope,” he said. “There’s a bigger opportunity there.”