The Paris Olympics
Issue 12: The world’s most prestigious sporting event can be a canvas for not just creativity, but pure and utter chaos.
The 2024 Paris Olympics served up a sincerely odd blend of elite athleticism and sheer spectacle, with antics that will be remembered just as fondly as the feats of strength and speed. It was brash, bold, occasionally bizarre, often beautiful and somehow the most French thing the world’s ever seen even when they weren’t trying.
The Games started and ended with a bang, as French metal band Gojira belted an ear-melting rendition of Ah! Ça Ira to kickstart what was certainly the horniest opening ceremony on record, before a flying-piano and swan-diving Tom Cruise closed things off.
But what happened in between was nothing short of unforgettable, for better or worse. Snoop Dogg as the unofficial mascot. Swimming in the Seine. Not swimming in the Seine. Swimming in the Seine, again. A pole-vaulter cockblocking himself. Kim Ye-ji singlehandedly making shooting feel cool after 233 years of American brand damage. The Noah Lyles photo finish. Imane Khelif fighting for her dignity. Simone Biles in all her glory. An Aussie Hockey player busted buying bags. Kaylee McKeown’s glasses.
Raygun.
Amid the fun, the athletes delivered jaw-dropping performances, shattered records and created new legends. But what made these Games truly special was how they captured the spirit of Paris, where elegance meets eccentricity and tradition dances with the avant-garde. In a city known for its art, fashion, and joie de vivre, the 2024 Olympics have shown that even the world’s most prestigious sporting event can be a canvas for not just creativity, but pure and utter chaos. This year’s antics served as a reminder that the Olympics are as much about human expression as they are about competition.
1.Act
The big conversation-starting ideas, strategies and executions that give businesses something to talk about. It’s about walking the talk to lay the foundations of a powerful message.
UP SHIT CREEK WITHOUT A MEDAL
A classic case of art vs. science
If we’re looking at Paris as a legacy brand, and the Olympic Games as one big campaign for it, it makes sense to draw on as much of the city’s culture as possible. Twirling together sport, art and history in a way that few other countries could, Paris drew on the city’s plethora of majorly famous landmarks as cinematic backdrops to sporting events. Equestrian at Versailles! Fencing at the Grand Palais! Archery at the Esplanade! Beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower! Could one get any more French than that?
Then there was the most ambitious plan of all: to hold the swimming portion of the triathlon events in the Seine. On paper this is all very good. Very logical. Very THE THEME, no? The event involves swimming (tick!). The Seine is an Extremely French Thing that is made of water (tick!). Yet the reality was less straightforward.
While swimming events were held in Seine for the 1900 Olympics, swimming in the city section of the 770km river has been banned for over a century, due to boating pollution and it being full of literal shit. And while it was confidently announced as early as 2015 that the Seine would be de-polluted to swimmable levels in time for the 2024 Games, it became pretty clear close to the moment that perhaps organisers had underestimated the task at hand.
Despite alarming levels of bacteria just weeks — days — out from the event, organisers remained adamant that the show would go on. On 30 July 30, 1.4 billion Euros, two well-documented publicity dips by city officials and a bit of heavy rain later, triathlon events were postponed due to water quality issues. It was announced that, worst case scenario, the swimming part would be scratched and the race would go ahead as a duathlon instead of a triathlon. Which sort of defeats the point, don’t you think? But then: a miracle. Kind of. On 31 August, the triathlon went ahead.
But at what cost?
Two Portuguese athletes who swam developed gastrointestinal infections. And a bunch of other athletes got sick too, which turned out later to be a viral infection. But at this point, the French media was baying for blood and reported gleefully that it was a result of the Seine swim.
The lead up alone is a great example of how issues management and crisis planning goes beyond having a few statements in the top drawer. You have to have real actions you can take to help mitigate an issue before it becomes a crisis. You can’t just spin your way out when your only option goes to, well, shit. And any issues management team worth its salt will have considered multiple eventualities down to the most nuanced possibility and suggested ways to establish backup measures that can then be communicated in an effective manner. It’s frankly bizarre they didn’t have a single back up option.
There’s another factor at hand here that comes with a handy lesson for any brand planning tits next action. Paris pitched to the International Olympic Committee that it would hold “an Olympics for the city” while forgetting that a city is made up of people before it is made up of buildings. Some ideas are better on paper. What we've seen is a concept that was hinged on an aesthetic idea of Paris rather than the heart of it.
The lesson here? (Trigger warning: it’s gonna flow like E.Coli through this whole issue.) Remember your core audience before you try to win over a new one. To truly be an Olympics for the city, you need to win over the people of the city first, otherwise it’s just an Olympics ABOUT the City.
2. Explain
The way those big ideas are distilled into words that resonate, build brand identity and nail the message.
SNOOP IS OMNIPRESENT
At first, we thought it was an Opening Ceremony thing. A host? A celebrity torch holder? But then he was everywhere. Having the best time. Horse crip walking into the Equestrian event. Swimming with Michael Phelps. Watching the skateboarding finals with Tony Hawk.
But how the hell does Brand Snoop explain itself as an entirely relevant inclusion across all these sports?
Because he can. If you’ve been anywhere on the internet in the past decade, you would be somewhat aware of Snoop’s slow and conscious undertaking of any event, sport, tech or franchise that he can get his hands on. He is known and loved for his proclivity to do anything for money: that smokeless BBQ, Corona, 19 Crimes wine, Old Navy, Burger King, he’s made appearances in Bollywood films, he’s the most featured rapper of all time at 581 guest verses, from Big Time Rush to Nü Metal.
If anything, his nondiscriminatory approach to securing the bag is consistent. And consistency begets authenticity. He’s a hustler. He always has been. People love him for it. Not in a tacky, money-hungry, losing-the-limelight sort of way, but in the way only Snoop knows how: with the grace of someone with a genuine interest in things.
He streams himself gaming on Twitch, loves a plethora of sports, has launched a gaming company (Death Row Games), bakes with Martha Stewart, and - as of three years ago – has previously spoken on the Olympics, famously co-commentating with Kevin Hart at the Tokyo 2020 Equestrian event.
So, it’s little wonder NBC took him to Paris as a “special correspondent” banking a cool $US500,000 a day for his appearances.
It’s worked! Views were up. Engagement across the admittedly-already-sports-crazed US was up, with an audience average of 34 million viewers. Snoop was cast as the “unofficial US mascot” (and rightly so), but his global antics and adoration left people wondering if he may in fact have been the unofficial mascot of the entire Paris Games.
Was he actually an abridging message for the handover to LA in 2028?
The irony cannot escape anyone that when it came to the one point of the Paris Games that Snoop was actually slated to do his thing (which is rap, for those who had forgotten), he did so from Venice Beach, California.
Sure, Snoop as a representative for Brand California feels like a far more natural fit but we still felt a little jilted.
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ANOTHER HOT TAKE?
Under-explaining is a thing, but over-explaining is also one, as evidenced by the Opening Ceremony’s creative director, who dragged the Last Supper Controversy through the press for days by changing his story and possibly offering more context than required. Pro tip? Sometimes it’s better to spark a little outrage and let things lie.
3.Amplify
It’s not a conversation if no one’s listening. Cleverly amplifying the message to the right audience, at the right time, is the final piece of the puzzle.
IS ‘ORRIBLE, NO?
Hell hath no fury like a disgruntled French person. And considering the human tendency to tell, say, one person about a good experience and as many as possible about a bad one, coupled with the French tendency to complain for the fun of it, it’s little wonder that Shit In The Seine went as viral as it did.
The campaign, if one could be so generous as to call it a campaign, is a fantastic example of the fact that there are people behind the platforms. That last series you binged on a streamer: was it because you saw a social ad for it, or because all your friends were talking about it? We know the answer. Ads work, but they really form part of a much more layered system of meaning making and influence that drives decision making.
All this to say: the Paris organisers found it so difficult to push shit up the river, because they forgot one thing: a city talks. We were in Paris the very weekend Macron threatened to swim in the city’s fecal waters, and you didn’t have to log on to know that Paris was threatening to shit in the Seine if he did. You only had to walk into a boulangerie, sit at a bar, or ask someone for a lighter. It was the talk of the bloody town. The point? Again, an Olympics for the city means that people must be at the heart of it all. And people like to gossip.
The takeaway? Understand the social facts, beliefs and passions of your people. Work out how your message authentically aligns with that and then preach the gospel. Authentically inspiring your core audience is the greatest driver of positive action for your brand and the fastest way to amplify the message you want out there.
If, however, you’re looking for a quick way to amplify the message you don’t want out there, try threatening a stunt to prove your audience wrong.
I mean, in what world was this image ever going to provide a semblance of social proof, let alone enough to turn a tide of angry Parisians with shit on their liver?
SPEAKING OF STUNTS: RAYGUN
Raygun's breakdancing performance has become a viral sensation, but not exactly in the way she'd hoped. We assume. Part of us is still holding out for the one-in-a-million chance this was elite social satire. Her unconventional routine, which has been likened to a five-year-old in a pool, a dog losing its mind in a fresh patch of grass, and at least three Chris Lilley characters, quickly became meme fodder shared across pretty much the whole modern internetscape, from meme pages all the way to Late Night Talk Shows and an Adele performance.
Say what you will about Raygun and whether her place was deserved or an example of entitlement, but don’t miss the lesson here: sometimes when your message is amplified in unanticipated ways, leaning in rather than fighting against it can yield spectacular results.
No, not all publicity is good publicity. Seriously. But that doesn’t mean all seemingly negative media has to have a bad result, and it certainly doesn’t mean you have to play things by the book.
The key is to first seriously audit the impact on your core business functions. Is this having a detrimental impact on the team’s safety? Stakeholder confidence? Your ability to sell product? Sometimes you might be surprised that the actual answer is “No”, or at least, something like a slight shareholder wobble is superseded by massive growth in an unexpected category. The best real-world example of this we’ve seen is how Banco de Bogota handled a recent crisis.
Back to Raygun: the initial onslaught was brutal. But did she hang her head in shame? Absolutely not. She leant into the joke and managed to find a positive message to align herself with; in doing so, she encouraged people to be their authentic selves and do what they love. The fact so many at home now love her is no coincidence. She has chosen to represent values many Australians identify with and in so doing, turned potential embarrassment into a moment of charm.
Raygun almost immediately got herself back out there on The Inspired Unemployed Instagram and led the dancing at the Closing Ceremony parade with fellow Aussie athletes. Last time we checked, she was about to hit 100,000 followers on Instagram and likely by the time this is sent, she’ll be well over. That’s impressive compared to the 4,000 she had at the start of the Games.
She may have missed the gold, the silver, the bronze, or a single point but Raygun may very well be headed for the Australian canon, right next to a succulent Chinese meal.
Picks & Recs
This issue’s Picks & Recs brought to you by SKMG’s own creative mastermind and COMMPRESS visuals guy, Benny. Here’s what he had to say:
I’m a design nerd and Paris is to the design nerd what Graceland is to Elvis fans. It’s Mecca. It’s effortlessly cool, not trendy. It’s chic, not flashy. The city is full of top typography and design porn. Bistro awnings, engraved street signs, subway maps, roller doors, menus and even serviettes are designed so goddamn beautifully. My camera roll — and even suitcase — is always bursting full of Parisian design references.
The Opening Ceremony had some real balls. Sure, it was polarising, but all great art is. That's the point. It didn't shy away from Paris’ rich and turbulent history, it leaned in on it all: the good, the bad and the ugly. But, sadly, the visual design around this year’s Olympic Games only ticked one of the mentioned three above.
There’s nothing to love, and there’s nothing to hate. It makes me sad at the missed opportunity to create something memorable because there is just SO MUCH to work with. From French Surrealism to Art Nouveau to Romanticism, pick one theme — hell, pick many themes — to work with. I’m sure there were some absolutely cracking conceptual mood boards that never made it past the first round creative presentation. It’s a damn shame. It’s Les Miserable.
But, as a sucker for sport and for design, I know my way around the historical visuals for the Olympics. Here are some notable bangers from the archive.
Japan’s rainbow ponchos at Sydney 2000
You have to see it to believe it.
Issey Miyake’s Lithuanian uniforms at Barcelona 1992
Paris needed something like this. These images were part of the incredible sportswear editorial in ARENA No.35 for Summer/Autumn 1992.
Sprinter Ato Boldon wears Oakley's Over The Top shades on the track at Sydney 2000
Just the kind of futuristic and throw-forward fashion accessory the new millennium needed. There’s a pair on eBay today for a cool 1,800 US bucks.
Jetpack at the opening ceremony for Los Angeles 1984
LA went full Hollywood and opened the Games with a guy jet-packing over the crowd for 20 seconds. Personally, I think the Games should be held in LA every four years, just to see how crazy it can get.
Saul Bass posters for Los Angeles 1984
Bass was an American graphic designer and Oscar-winning filmmaker, best known for his design of motion-picture title sequences, film posters and corporate logos. So, it’s only fitting that the advertising of the 1984 LA Olympics should feel like a Hollywood blockbuster.
Using the Olympic Rings as design advice
Here’s a few of my favourite ways to use the Olympic rings in design.
This fake Mercedes Benz ad from this year
Zed Anwar turned an incredible shot of Simone Biles from this year into a remarkable spec advertisement for Mercedes. Would love to see brands be more reactive like this!