Nike’s Olympic Push Highlights Symbiotic Relationship Between Advertising and Sponsorship

Those of us who endeavor day to day to create and execute partnerships between brands and rights holders often call attention to the distinctions between partnerships and other forms of marketing, especially advertising.

It’s typically necessary to do this for two reasons. First, as a reminder that sponsorship packages must include rights and benefits that go beyond generating visibility in order to not only meaningfully connect with fans, but also offer value beyond cost-per-thousand impressions—a playing field where advertising efficiency in delivering eyeballs will always win.

Second, as we seek the upper hand in the competition for share of marketing budgets, we often point out sponsorship’s unique qualities and advantages compared to advertising, including authentically connecting to the athletes, teams and events that people love.

But although it is true that ads alone do not forge the types of relationships with fans that sponsorships can, truly creative advertising can relay emotion and provoke intense feelings that even the best official partnerships could never do on their own.

Put another way, even when fans understand, respect and recall the commitment of a brand like Nike in its role as an official outfitter of Team USA, or as a personal sponsor of a favorite athlete at the Paris Olympic Games, it cannot match the visceral response to seeing the apparel giant’s new Winning Isn’t for Everyone campaign.

Whether they love or hate the 90-second spot that focuses on elite athletes’ drive and determination to win at all costs, watching it makes the viewer think and feel.

This of course isn’t unfamiliar territory for Nike and its longtime ad agency partner Wieden + Kennedy, the architects of “Just Do It,” “You Don’t Win Silver, You Lose Gold” and lots of other in-your-face messaging.

But in all its decades of memorable ads, as well as involvement with Olympic athletes and teams, this year marks Nike’s best and biggest attempt to balance the two and achieve optimal impact for its brand and products. In doing so, the company has reminded us all that as much as they compete for brand dollars, sponsorships and advertising are not adversaries. On the contrary, they are the definition of complementary assets—fitting together to form a complete picture.

In addition to the emotion-evoking Winning Isn’t for Everyone platform—which includes a Nike.com microsite with video clips and interviews with 15 athletes featured in the campaign, including Sha’Carri Richardson, LeBron James, Serena Williams, Sabrina Ionescu, Cristiano Ronaldo, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kylian Mbappé and Kobe Bryant—Nike is promoting its official partner status with teams participating in the Paris Games in a much bigger way than it usually does.

The brand began those efforts with a three-day promotional extravaganza in April in Paris to highlight its relationship with athletes, the national Olympic committees of the U.S., Germany, Brazil, Kenya and “more than 100 federations,” according to Nike. It will continue that activation during the Games, with events at the Centre Pompidou modern art museum.

The focus of Nike’s partnership activations is on product innovation, in particular what Vogue Business dubbed “a reinvention of the Nike Air sneaker…The brand debuted new iterations to be worn by its athletes at the Olympics; a new Pegasus Premium model for consumers, launching in 2025; and an AI-generated interpretation of Air tech, co-created with athletes.”

As Nike’s chief innovation officer John Hoke told Vogue, “There is a cascading effect where those technologies that help the elite athletes are then applied to the everyday.”

With pressure from upstart competitors such as On Running, Hoka and others leading to a slump in its sales and stock price, Nike’s largest investment ever in Olympic marketing comes at a key time. Its decision to go big on both partnership activation and a bold new ad campaign at the same time, while not a panacea for the company’s troubles, is a bold step in the right direction.