Olympics Scrambles to Bridge Generation Gap

The upcoming Winter Olympics seem to be a marketing and financial dream. Corporations have poured a record sum into Olympic sponsorship deals. And, despite the recession, NBC has sold more than 95% of the commercial time available during its broadcasts from Salt Lake City.

But beneath the rosy glow, there is a growing concern that the Olympic movement may fall victim to a generation gap that could erode the popularity and financial strength of future Games.

Olympic viewership ratings have been sliding for the last decade, dragged down largely by the absence of free-spending young adults. It seems younger people don’t find the Games as relevant or compelling as their baby boomer parents do.

Seeking to boost interest among young adults, NBC is carrying its Olympic promotions online, into movie theaters, onto leading college campuses and into trendy nightclubs. And the U.S. Olympic Committee has pledged to work with the network and Olympic marketing partners to become the “lightning rod” that recharges interest in the Olympics among younger Americans.

At the same time, Olympic caretakers also are concerned that the next generation of corporate executives, awash in a sea of attractive marketing partnerships, will be less interested in forging costly Olympic sponsorship deals. And, as the costs of grooming athletes and building Olympic venues keep rising, such a decline could be financially crippling.

No one should mistake the Olympics for a 98-pound weakling. When it comes to public awareness in the United States, the Olympic Games continue to outshine the National Football League and other sports leagues. On the global scene, only World Cup soccer is as powerful a force. But it’s clear that the Olympic movement and its partners need to cash in on that capital.

“You can’t rest on the laurels of the incredible legacy of our Olympic movement,” said Lloyd D. Ward, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s chief executive. “Young people today are a ‘show me’ culture so you have to go through a rebirth, you have to renew your brand equity for each succeeding generation.”

To keep today’s advertisers and sponsors happy--and ensure that today’s younger viewers will continue to tune in as they grow older--the Olympics must restore television ratings. High ratings translate into heftier advertising fees. And corporations that need to move colas, cars, cell phones and candy bars--largely to free-spending young adults--won’t keep signing checks if Olympic broadcasts can’t deliver.

Steep Decline in Young Viewers Network executives have reason to be alarmed by the drop in viewership among adults ages 18 to 24. Between the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, Spain, and the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, viewership among men in that highly coveted age group fell by 55%. And viewership among women in the same age bracket fell by 41%. Those numbers are well beyond the 16% overall decline among all households during the same period, a drop network executives tie to the ongoing splintering of mass media that has hurt all sports broadcasts.

At issue, observers say, is how Americans view the Olympics. Baby boomers clearly remember the Olympics as “this singular, special event,” said Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s president of research and media development. But observers say NBC and its Olympic partners haven’t educated younger adults on what makes the Olympics so special.

The generational challenges arise at a time when corporate sponsors are being wooed by creative marketing executives at such competing attractions as the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl. Olympic caretakers also are struggling to keep the Games relevant to young Americans who are embracing extreme sports that don’t always fit into the Olympic mold.

Olympic marketers might well be talking about Joy De Guzman, 25, a first-year UC Berkeley law student who is only vaguely aware that the Winter Games are fast approaching.

“I don’t know when, and I don’t know what channel they’re on,” said De Guzman, who watches sitcoms, not sports, when she chooses to linger in front of a television.

Patrick Farrell, a 32-year-old tax attorney in Los Angeles, said he’s more likely to be watching college basketball or professional football than the Olympics. Other than women’s figure skating, the Winter Games mean “very little” to a guy who doesn’t own skis, he said.

The Olympic generation gap is a product largely of time and history.

Viewers older than 35 watch the Olympics through a lens colored by “the prism of the Cold War,” NBC’s Wurtzel said. “It was the good guys against the bad guys.”

The Olympics are etched into the collective experience of aging baby boomers along with the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s resignation.

The 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City produced the unforgetable image of black Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowing their heads and giving a Black Power salute from the medals platform after the 200-meter run. A shocked world watched the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, Germany, when terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes.

Games Viewed as ‘Big Media Event’ The Cold War also shaped competition. The U.S. boycotted the Moscow Summer Games in 1980 after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Soviets retaliated by staying home from the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games.

The Cold War is over, but boomers are still aglow over the 1980 “Miracle on Ice,” when the unsung U.S. hockey team beat the powerful Soviet Union squad. And boomers are still seething over the 1972 basketball gold medal game, when the Soviet Union upset the vaunted U.S. team.

Absent that historical context, younger viewers tend to view the Olympics as “a big media event” not unlike the Golden Globes or the Super Bowl, Wurtzel said.

Baby boomers who control the networks were raised to view athletics “as pure sport, not entertainment,” said Rick Burton, executive director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon. But Generation Y, Burton said, wants its sports prepared with a liberal sprinkling of music, entertainment and fashion to create a tasty lifestyle stew.

Savvy marketers are learning that the customer--in this case, the viewer watching television at home--usually is right. Sports, they say, might be the main event, but it doesn’t have to exist in a vacuum. That’s why the NFL’s weekend-long Super Bowl bash in New Orleans next Sunday is top-heavy with such pop stars as Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Sting and U2. The annual halftime show enjoys some of the strongest ratings of what’s usually the top-rated television broadcast each year.

Music, Lifestyle Elements Planned The Olympics and NBC are taking a page from the NFL’s playbook and jamming as many music and lifestyle events as possible into broadcasts from Salt Lake City. But NBC’s production chiefs won’t tinker with the athletic action, so don’t expect rock videos blaring during the half-pipe event.

But the drama of the opening ceremony Feb. 8 will be expanded to include such popular entertainers as the Dixie Chicks and LeAnn Rimes. And, after each night’s medals presentation, viewers will be invited to stick around for concerts starring top acts, including Sheryl Crow and the Dave Matthews Band.

Music and lifestyle elements are there to draw “people who don’t necessarily identify themselves as sports fans,” said David Neal, an executive vice president of NBC Olympics. “If we can get them to sample the opening night’s programming, we truly believe we’ll get them to come back.”

NBC also recognizes that younger viewers aren’t always tuned into network or cable stations, although it continues to flood its airwaves with Olympic promotions. But NBC also is using other means to reach potential Olympic viewers.

NBC produced a glossy commercial featuring Olympians Chris Klug and Cammi Granato that is playing as a theatrical trailer. It also created a Web site ( www.hotsnow.com ) that’s top-heavy with music and action-sports videos.

Two Winnebagos loaded with state-of-the-art sound systems, video games and bins filled with giveaways are crisscrossing the country to spread the Olympic word. The mobile marketing machines stop in parking lots outside such events as a Creed concert at Philadelphia’s First Union Center and the Wild Hare, a Chicago bar that describes itself as the “reggae capital of America.”

NBC also is teaming up with Coca-Cola Co. and Burly Bear, a cable television network serving college campuses, to encourage new viewers by hosting opening ceremony parties Feb. 8 at bars near 50 big campuses, including UCLA, Arizona State and Harvard.

Generational issues also drove the U.S. Olympic Committee’s recent decision to hire sports-marketing giant IMG, which represents such stars as Tiger Woods, to broker corporate sponsorships through the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Robert Prazmark, a sports marketing executive who began brokering Olympic marketing deals in the 1980s--and who will serve as IMG’s president of Olympic sales and marketing--said he faces a potential generation gap at the top of the corporate world. More than half a dozen Olympic supporters, including Arthur Martinez (Sears, Roebuck & Co.), Hugh McColl (Bank of America) and Paul A. Allaire (Xerox Corp.), have already retired or soon will.

Top corporate executives have a wealth of sponsorship choices that weren’t even close to the Olympics in stature when Prazmark began brokering Olympic deals in the 1980s. “I’m looking over my shoulder at the NFL, the Academy Awards, the NBA, the Grammys--and excuse me, please, to anyone else I’m forgetting,” he said. “All of a sudden, the gap is really narrow.”

And, as the gap between the Olympics and competing properties narrows, corporate sponsors no longer will be content to simply “rent the rings,” as Prazmark said, and slap them on cola cups, delivery trucks and corporate letterheads.

“We’ve got to reintroduce the whole reason why a corporation becomes involved with the Olympics,” he said. “That’s really our main job--reintroducing the Olympic proposition to a new corporate leadership.”

Along with the rest of the world, the Olympic movement is adjusting to new realities created by the events of Sept. 11. New NBC market research suggests that younger adults are rethinking their country’s role in the world. A stunning 80% of younger adults now say they have an interest in the Games. But the question remains, will they be watching?

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Times staff writer Laura Loh contributed to this report.