The 7 best ad campaigns that streamed on the Olympics

This Paris Olympics was a historic one. Not only did the 2024 Summer Games introduce breakdancing and feature the same number of female and male athletes for the first time ever, they also represented a significant win for programmatic advertising.

For the first time, NBCUniversal, U.S. media rights holder to the Olympic Games through 2032, streamed all Olympics content on Peacock and opened up the platform to programmatic ads. This gave advertisers more accessibility than ever before, with 70% of advertisers on Peacock coming from brands new to the Olympics. At the same time, major brand sponsors like Visa and Omega leaned into programmatic to help enhance their campaigns with incremental reach.

And the audience was ready for it. Peacock coverage was a clear success, topping 20 billion streaming minutes through the last Thursday of the Games, a boost of 21% from the 16.8 billion from NBCUniversal’s prior summer and winter Olympics across its digital platforms.

Here at The Current, we wanted to award our own gold medals for the best ad campaigns that ran during the first-ever programmatic Olympics.

Omega wins gold for creativity

As the official timekeeper for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the 176-year-old brand has kept with the times not only by running ads on linear TV but also by serving up programmatic spots on Peacock. The visually compelling campaign plays with scale, creating awe-inspiring optical illusions that celebrate the city of Paris with dreamlike scenes of 12 athletes competing across some of the city’s most recognizable sights.

Olympic high-jump gold medalist Gianmarco Tamberi leaps over the Arc de Triomphe, pole-vault world-record-holder Mondo Duplantis arches over the Sacré-Cœur Basilica and golfer Céline Boutier tees off from the top of the Notre -Dame.

The brand partnered with French rapper SDM to create the background track “Born To Be a Legend,” which encapsulates the theme of overcoming challenges. It doesn’t even matter whether viewers can speak French — it’s all about the visuals.

Dick’s wins gold for heartwarming comedy

The sporting-goods store is the official sporting-goods retailer for Team USA for the Paris Olympics and the coming Games in Los Angeles. As well as running ads on linear TV, Dick’s Sporting Goods leaned into programmatic to showcase its spot during the Olympics and the coming Paralympics.

In its “Big Moments” campaign, the brand showed real-world stories from kids’ first joyful moments with sports, set against Vangelis’ “Chariots of Fire.” The result is one of the more moving spots of the Paris Olympics and showcases the brand’s enduring efforts to inspire young athletes. The spot took silver on USA Today’s Ad Meter.

Lilly takes the gold for inspiring messaging

Lilly, a partner of both the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams and which serves as the official Team USA Partner in health equity, came to the Games with a paid partnership with gold medalist gymnast Suni Lee. Lee fought through kidney disease to compete this year, and Lilly’s inspirational campaign emphasized the importance of taking care of our bodies.

“Because no matter how strong you make your body, its health may be out of your control,” reads the ad. “But you don’t have to accept that. After all, about a billion things had to happen for you to even be born. And since you only get one body, let’s fight like hell for it.”

Uber takes the gold in Olympics tie-in

Uber’s Olympics commercial is all about “showing up” for one another, just as the ride-share service promises to do for its customers. The in-house spot features a montage of disappointing scenarios in which people are let down or ghosted; then the scenes turn positive to the tune of The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

Uber CMO Jill Hazelbaker tells Inc. that the tagline “We all need someone to show up” is something athletes and nonathletes can relate to. “This is especially important to Uber, because the way that our customers feel about us has an outsize impact on our ability to launch new products and operate our business around the world,” she says.

Prudential wins the gold in stellar results

Many major brands that ran linear TV spots on the Olympics in the past used programmatic this year to strategically extend their reach. Prudential did just that and saw 86% incremental reach against its target audience compared to its linear spots, according to Kieran Geyer, paid media manager at Prudential. “This has been a really efficient way to supplement and round out our media strategy,” Geyer tells The Current.

The Prudential spot highlights a teacher’s retirement journey, and calls on viewers to “protect your life’s work.”

San Diego Zoo wins gold as first-time advertiser

The popular zoo was one of many advertisers that was able to advertise during the Olympics thanks to NBCUniversal’s addition of programmatic.

San Diego Zoo used the Olympics for an ad (with David & Goliath as creative agency and The Shipyard as media agency) that spotlights a special message: Pandas are officially back to the zoo as the result of a new panda conservation deal with China. The ad drove a 97% completion rate with nearly 234,000 views.

Visa wins gold for celebrity standouts

Visa, a worldwide Olympic and Paralympic Partner, added programmatic to its linear TV strategy for its “Prodigies” campaign. In the spots, created by Wieden+Kennedy, archival footage of stars zero in on the challenges they’ve all had to face to be the best in their fields.

Featured stars include musician Pharrell Williams, race car driver Daniel Ricciardo, chef Roy Choi, tennis player Iga Świątek, Olympic skateboarder Sky Brown, and artist and designer Gemma O’Brien.