The Olympics is expected to be one of the biggest broadcast events of the summer. But for many younger viewers, they might spend more time watching the competition and the content that surrounds it on social platforms like TikTok than on the TV screen.

That means that the organizing committee itself, as well as the advertisers looking to target audiences interested in the games, are preparing for an Olympic-sized presence on social media to accompany the competition on NBC.

In other words, expect Olympics-related ads, content, and shoulder programming to descend on just about every screen ahead of the Opening Ceremony.

“It’s no longer enough to make a beautiful TV ad and put an official logo at the end of it,” Rahul Titus, global head of influence at Ogilvy, told Marketing Brew. “You need to make sure you’re looking at it as a connected ecosystem, where you’re activating your athletes on the ground, on social media, pre the event, post-event, and that’s a much more complicated and complex system. Obviously, there’s beauty in it and it’s a very high-reward system if you get it right, but it’s tougher.”

Continue reading here.—AM

The trick to taking your brand to the big time? You gotta start putting your business in show business. Yep, we’re talkin’ hit shows like Yellowstone, RuPaul's Drag Race, Survivor, and oh so many more.

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Stream into the big leagues.

Hurry—the world only has around a day left to bone up on water polo and fencing.

The 2024 Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony, airing Friday, will kick off two weeks of international competition, and advertisements and brands will be squeezed in between national anthems and slow-motion shots of athletic melodrama.

We at Marketing Brew thought it might make sense to run down some of the sponsorships and ad sales stats for the games, which run through August 11.

Going for gold: After subsequent Olympics ratings disappointments in 2021 and 2022, it’s looking like 2024 could be a comeback year for NBCUniversal, which owns the US broadcast rights to the Olympics through 2032.

• During the day, the broadcaster plans to offer at least nine hours of coverage, including live coverage of the swimming, track and field, and gymnastics finals across both linear TV and its streaming service Peacock.
• In prime time, the broadcaster will air a recap of each day’s competitions. Snoop Dogg and Peyton Manning will join NBC mainstay Mike Tirico for broadcasting duties, because, sure, why not?

In April, Dan Lovinger, NBCU’s president of Olympic and Paralympic partnerships, told reporters that the company had already brought in $1.2 billion in ad sales against the games and was on track to bring in the most ad revenue in Olympic history.

• The broadcaster has cited the benefits of a more favorable time difference than the previous two Olympics in Tokyo and Beijing, as well as the Covid protocols at those games that made some components of the broadcast more difficult.

Read more here.—RB

We’re in the thick of Love Island season, which—if you don’t watch—generally means Brits in bikinis crowing “I got a text!”

Consumers, too, might have noticed an influx of messages on their mobiles. According to Attentive CEO Amit Jhawar, brands are increasingly on the other end of the line, and they could have a lot to gain from it.

Jhawar recently spoke to Tech Brew about how the digital marketing platform helps retailers integrate SMS—or short message service—communications into their campaigns and how it’s leveraging artificial intelligence to deliver a highly tailored shopping experience.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

For starters, can you tell us a little bit about what Attentive does and where it fits into the communications landscape?

Attentive is a mobile marketing platform that focuses on personalizing messages between brands and their consumers. …We want to deliver bespoke shopping experiences. If you think about going to a website today, [we] can all go to the same website. And we’ll get the exact same experience regardless of what we’re each interested in.

As more shoppers move to mobile—and you want to reach shoppers where they’re spending their time on their mobile devices—you’re seeing a lot more behavior where these consumers are distracted. And hitting these consumers with SMS messages that have the right content for the categories that they’re most interested in, the brands they care about, results in a much better experience, both for the consumer and the brand.

Continue reading on Tech Brew.—KG

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Stories we’re jealous of.

• The Sunday Times profiled influencer Hannah Neeleman, known online as Ballerina Farm, and examined her role in the “trad wife” movement.
• The Atlantic wrote about the memes surrounding Vice President Kamala Harris and the digital strategy opportunities they present for her presidential campaign.
• Bloomberg wrote about how upscale grocery chain Erewhon achieved its cult-like following.