What We Are Watching For in Paris

Nine days from now, the opening ceremony floats down the Seine and the biggest brand stage of the year opens for business. The Olympics remain the strangest event in advertising: a global audience of billions, some of the tightest usage rules in sport, and a graveyard of expensive work that mistook presence for an idea. Before the flood arrives, here is what we will be watching for, and what we think separates the work that lasts from the work that merely airs.

Athletes are the media channel now

The IOC's Rule 40 still restricts how non-sponsor brands can use Olympians during the Games window, but the loosened guidelines of recent cycles have shifted the center of gravity. The athletes themselves, on their own channels, are now the most interesting inventory in Paris. A gymnast's training diary or a sprinter's day-in-the-village video will out-travel most thirty-second spots, and the brands that invested in athlete relationships months ago, rather than booking celebrity cameos in June, will collect the return.

Watch for the difference between brands that sponsor an athlete and brands that actually understand one. The first group produces posters. The second produces stories with specific, verifiable detail: the 4:45 a.m. alarm, the physio bills, the fourth-place finish in Tokyo that fueled three more years. Specificity is the tell. Generic inspiration is what you buy when you started too late.

The city is the set

Paris made an audacious choice to stage sport inside the city instead of in distant purpose-built venues. Beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower, fencing in the Grand Palais, skateboarding at Place de la Concorde. That decision is a gift to every art director on earth, and it raises the bar accordingly. If the host city is doing scenography this good for free, a brand film shot against a gray cyc is going to look like a missed meeting.

We expect the strongest visual work to lean into place: out-of-home that behaves like it belongs on a Haussmann facade, work that treats Paris as collaborator rather than backdrop.

What we hope not to see

Every Games produces the same failure modes, so consider this a bingo card:

• The montage of diverse athletes over swelling strings, interchangeable across any of a dozen sponsors.
• The tenuous product link: a snack brand claiming a role in "fueling greatness."
• Ambush attempts that spend more effort dodging Rule 40 than saying anything.
• Purpose statements with no operational proof behind them.

None of these are crimes. They are just wasted money, and the Olympics punishes waste at unusual scale because everything airs next to the real thing: actual humans doing actual extraordinary things. Sentiment that would pass on an ordinary Tuesday looks thin beside a weightlifter's third attempt.

The brief underneath the brief

The real assignment in Paris, for any brand, is the same one it always is: find the one true thing you can say that nobody else can, and say it with enough craft that people are glad it interrupted them. The Games just raise the stakes and shorten the window.

Our team will be watching with notebooks out, and we will publish a review of the work once the closing ceremony wraps. Early prediction: the best thing we see will have been made by a small team with a modest budget and an athlete they genuinely know. It usually is.