General Motors is withdrawing from its long-standing Olympics sponsorship after the 2008 Beijing summer games, believing its already reaching that Olympics audience with its current marketing.
“We feel we already have the ability to reach this audience through existing marketing deals,” GM spokeswoman Ryndee Carney said.
Confronting what Carney called a “much more fragmented” media landscape than existed when GM made its billion-dollar sponsorship pact with the U.S. Olympics Committee and NBC in 1997, the auto maker wants more flexibility in its media commitments than that big-ticket pact afforded it, she said.
She declined to comment on whether the move indicated plans to reduce its overall marketing budget.
“Basically, there has been a lot of change in our advertising strategy and the media landscape in general,” Carney said. “We don’t want to be locked into 10-year agreements.”
In the intervening 10 years, Carney noted that GM had shifted its sports marketing tactics by establishing ties between specific brands and various sports, linking Pontiac with the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Chevrolet with NASCAR and Buick with pro golf.
GM figures it has other “avenues” to reach the same audience as it had with its Olympics sponsorship without incurring the high-ticket cost of entry and the two-year hiatus between each set of summer and winter games, Carney said. She also noted that deal tie-ins are difficult to initiate when the games are on foreign soil.
However, she did not rule out some form of Olympics involvement beyond the 2008 Beijing games. She noted that GM of Canada will be a sponsor for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, and Chevrolet will continue its sponsorship of the U.S. snowboarding squad.
Network
