Toyota and the Olympic dilemma

One hundred days before the opening of the 2024 Paris Olympics, Toyota fired up its promotional campaign for the games by unleashing an inspirational “send off” video on social media. 

The 60-second heartwarmer comes from an automaker that has been a top-tier Olympic sponsor since 2017, and spent a rumoured $835mn on the effort. Alas, after more than a month online, at the time of writing the charming montage had not even had 6,000 views on Toyota’s official YouTube channel. For scale, that’s the number of cars the company sold worldwide every 4.5 hours in 2023.

Enough, it seems, is enough. The Olympics have changed because the viewership has changed and it takes moments like these to appreciate that and rethink. Toyota’s record-breaking, four-Olympic (two summer, two winter games) contract with the International Olympic Committee will end when the torch leaves Paris later this year. Toyota, say sources at the company, has no plans to renew.

The decision says a lot about Toyota, more about the Olympics and more still about how far the consumption of content has moved since the contract began. Young people, say advertisers, are not watching the Olympics with anything like the enthusiasm of previous generations. The next eight years could make Toyota’s decision look very smart.

Clearly, there are significant risks in abandoning an inherently globalised, marketing enterprise that, in theory, causes billions of global eyeballs to fix on your brand every two years. These are message-dependent times, and a gargantuan summer set piece is not something to snub in a hurry.

This is especially so for Toyota, whose messaging issues are already tormented by its determination (for now) to back all horses. It is sending 3,000 hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles to the Paris games, has revealed real progress on a solid-state electric vehicle battery but has also just unveiled plans for a new generation of internal combustion engines. To both investors and customers, the company has plenty of explaining to do over the coming years, and may need a big platform to do so. As Tesla and the emerging ranks of Chinese EV makers roll out ever more competitive wares, the Japanese heavyweight is perhaps their juiciest and most topple-able foe. Would it not be disastrous for Toyota if BYD, Hyundai or Nio takes the vacated top-tier Olympic slot? 

Possibly. Both the Fomo and the threat of a rival stealing the limelight are real, say advertising executives who have worked closely with Toyota and other top-tier Olympic partners. But these are outweighed by a catalogue of greater risks.

The first of these is cost. Toyota would never say this out loud, but it did not get $835mn of value from a sponsorship deal that straddled the Covid-blighted 2020 games in Tokyo and 2022 winter games in Beijing. And while that crisis was beyond anyone’s control, the nature of blame apportionment by both mainstream and social media means top sponsors are now routinely interrogated as accessories as the IOC lurches between scandals and host nations are grilled on everything from human rights abuses to failures of sustainability.

The second risk is the extent to which the Olympics are both a hostage to geopolitical fortune and a showcase of fissures. They always have been, of course — three were cancelled due to war, and boycotts shrivelled them in 1980 and 1984 — but the grim probabilities seem greater today than at any time in the last 40 years. Should a would-be sponsor hope that sport will work its conciliatory magic, or accept that eight years is no longer a predictable geopolitical horizon?

The biggest source of concern, though, is that the Olympics can no longer deliver on the billions-of-eyeballs promise, particularly among the under-35s. The IOC may imagine it is solving that problem by introducing skateboarding and breakdancing to the games, but advertisers know modern audience attention takes an awful lot of grabbing from an extremely fickle environment.

The problem, says one senior advertising executive who has worked closely with several top-tier Olympic sponsors, is that the fragmentation of media consumption and the ever bigger offerings of live sport and other content mean that viewers do not feel as connected to the games as they used to. The difficulty for a sponsor is that, while there may indeed be millions watching the pole vaulting, and by extension the sponsor’s brand in the background, millions more — the next generation of potential Toyota owners, for example — are watching the pole vaulter’s unbranded TikTok video of what they had for breakfast.

Toyota has decided to sit the next phase out. Others may soon follow.

leo.lewis@ft.com