IOC sponsors ignore criticism
The German Olympic sponsor is also silent
2/2/2022 3:23 p.m
If you get a lot of public attention, you also have to take responsibility. However, the top sponsors of the Olympic Games collectively dodge it. Also Allianz, which pays a lot of money for visibility, but apparently does not consider human rights violations worth mentioning.
They pay enormous amounts of money, they use it to finance a large part of the Olympic Games, and they would like to get something back for their investment. At the moment, however, the 13 top sponsors from the “Olympic Partner Program” have to take criticism, primarily because they remain silent about the serious violations of human rights by host China. They duck away – as if they had coordinated with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
The top sponsors reportedly contribute more than one billion US dollars to the IOC’s sales of around 5.5 billion US dollars in the current four-year cycle. So you could have an impact. But they don’t. Before the games, for example, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch asked the sponsors to distance themselves from the Olympics in Beijing. Nobody reacted. Not even the German Allianz Group – despite demonstrations, protests and petitions.
“Sponsors don’t like such discussions at all. Basically, they don’t want to deal with such things,” explained Dennis Trautwein, Managing Director of the Octagon agency, which operates worldwide. However, he emphasized that a sponsor must “think about the position they want to take early on” when it comes to an issue such as human rights violations. And then “communicate clearly from beginning to end”.
Hope means forgetting
Trautwein thinks it’s pretty clumsy that the sponsors are ducking away. “No one should make the mistake of simply ignoring these discussions. But some sponsors will do that, they will say: I’m just a partner, that’s not my responsibility.” For example, Allianz, a “Worldwide Olympic Partner” since 2020, has never publicly responded to demands by activists from the “Tibet Initiative Germany” that it should withdraw as a sponsor of the Beijing Games.
The Munich group paid an estimated 400 million euros to the IOC in order to be able to present itself at the games in Los Angeles until 2028. And that’s what all sponsors are counting on: that the Olympic Games in Beijing will be forgotten as quickly as possible and that Paris 2024 will come to the fore. “The positive aspects that a brand achieves with the partnership will probably have a longer lasting effect than the isolated excitement that arises around the critical topics,” believes expert Trautwein.
Trautwein still considers ducking away in the case of Beijing to be a mistake. With the attention that sponsors strive for with a partnership with the IOC, a responsibility ultimately also arises: “And you should also face up to this responsibility as a sponsor and take a clear position.” It is to be expected that the IOC is not a role model in this case, he adds: “There will always be soft-spoken statements because China is a market that is also commercially important for the IOC.”