Just wanna drive

The GIST: Last Friday, chief brand and commercial officer of the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) and CEO of the Canadian Olympic Foundation Jacquie Ryan was honored as the Canadian Marketing Association’s Marketer of the Year for her work during Paris 2024. While Team Canada is already the top sports property in the country, Ryan’s efforts helped its fandom flourish.

• The GIST spoke with Ryan on Monday about Team Canada’s successful Paris strategy and her key learnings ahead of the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics. A new day has come.

📚 Athletes drove storytelling. The “Brave Is Unbeatable” campaign produced with CBC/Radio-Canada generated over 252M media impressions and a 53% boost in positive feelings toward Team Canada. Narrated by Céline Dion and Michael J. Fox, it sought to “highlight barriers and obstacles that athletes face and connect them to Canadians in a deeper way,” per Ryan.

🇨🇦 In-person experiences boosted engagement. Canada Olympic House was open to the public for the first time during a Summer Olympics and welcomed 17K total visitors in Paris, including for its Lululemon pop-up and Air Canada patio experience. Back home, the COC’s Team Canada FanFest offered live Olympic viewings, athlete appearances, and sponsor activations to 50K visitors.

• Ryan acknowledged this was the first summer Olympic Games following the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed for successful in-person experiences. “This was our first fullest expression of the Olympic Games since prior to Tokyo, so that really provided an incredible opportunity,” Ryan said.

📺 Media offerings engaged fans. Team Canada’s new Momentum podcast hosted by popular luger Arianne Jones boasted 40K downloads. And while TV and digital viewership hit all-time highs, so did social media interactions. Team Canada saw 75M engagements and views combined (up 88% from Tokyo 2020) and its social audience grew by 25%.

Zooming out: Team Canada experienced a lot of firsts in Paris 2024, and many were a product of the ever-evolving sports marketing world that prioritizes digital media channels, authentic storytelling, and celeb assists. Meeting Canadians where they are motivated them to show up and enjoy the Games, while also allowing sponsors to connect with fans in new ways. Beauty.

The GIST: The Players Era Festival — a new men’s college basketball tournament — may not include women’s teams (yet), but its payout structure highlights a unique workaround that allows student-athletes to earn financial rewards without technically violating NCAA rules. Fascinating.

The tournament: The three-day event tipped off yesterday as eight teams, including Oregon and Notre Dame, compete for up to $9M in NIL rewards. Each squad will see at least $1M awarded to its school’s NIL collective — an astronomically high number that has created some skeptics, since such tourneys typically only generate $1M to $3M in revenue.

How it works: Per Yahoo Sports, to comply with the NCAA’s rules against paying athletes directly for their performance, presenting sponsors such as Starbucks, Eli Lilly, and MGM Resorts pay the tournament organizers, who then allocate money to each school’s NIL collective. Coaches then decide how to distribute the money to athletes.

• NIL collectives have presented a fascinating loophole that allows companies and donors to financially reward athletes while technically abiding by the NCAA’s rules.

The goal: Organizers for the Players Era Festival have big plans, including expanding its bracket, adding a women’s basketball tourney, and awarding more than $50M in NIL incentives by 2027. It remains to be seen how the first edition goes, but if organizers really have the money (and sponsors) to back up these claims, it could be an interesting space for brands to activate.

Zooming out: Women’s college basketball is still fighting to see its tourneys treated equally: It only landed the March Madness moniker in 2022 and teams still don’t earn financial rewards for their March performances like the men do. But things are scaling up quickly as viewership rises — and for any brand footing the bill for a comparable women’s tourney, the wins would be big.

• Companies like State Farm — which just signed USC star JuJu Watkins as its second-ever college NIL athlete — are already recognizing women’s basketball players’ potential brand power. In March, SponsorUnited reported women’s college basketball enjoyed a 60% increase in the number of NIL deals YoY, far greater than its men’s counterpart. Check.

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