This is Global Language Monitor’s Eighth Consecutive Olympic Ambush Marketing Rankings.

The Global Language Monitor (GLM) has released the first Official Ambush Marketing Rankings for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. GLM has found that the Top Olympic Partners and their ambushers are virtually tied according to their Brand Affiliation Index (BAI) scores.

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The Top Olympic Partners for Tokyo 2020 follow:

Aliba
Airbnb.
Atos.
Bridgestone.
Coca-Cola.
Dow.
General Electric.
Intel.
Panasonic.
Procter & Gamble.
Samsung Electronics.
Swatch Group (Omega, Tissot).
Toyota
Visa

GLM’s research has identified the top ambush marketers for each of the Tokyo 2020 Top Partners; many of these, of course, carry over from one Olympiad to the next.

The chart below shows each Top Partner with ‘Non-affiliated Marketers’ (NAMs) or ambushers.

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The Global Language Monitor’s (GLM) Brand Affiliation Index (BAI), is a proprietary, longitudinal study that analyzes the global association between (and among) individual brands and their competitors or, in this case, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. In the study, The Global Language Monitor measured several dozen factors, closely examining all marketing movements extending from London 2012 to Tokyo 2020. GLM has been tracking the Olympics in this manner since the Beijing Summer Games (2008).

Though official numbers are never released, each Top Partner is believed to pay some 100 million USD for the privilege. GLM has found that the actual number is closer to 1,000,000,000 USD for each Olympiad, fully loaded. This includes indirect costs associated with the sponsorship such as an apparently endless number of activities, contests, promotional items, and events.

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Of course, in 2020 GLM found that the Tokyo 2020 Games had themselves been ambushed by the coronavirus with a remarkable 92.8% correlation to the ongoing Pandemic. This is up some eight percentage points from a year ago when the Games were first postponed. This means that in GLM’s global research data, out of every 100 references to the 2020 Summer Games, more some 92 now contained a reference to the coronavirus and/or COVID-19.

“Over the years we’ve met some unlikely ambushers from cartoon characters (Beijing 2008, Kung-fu Panda) to world leaders on the brink of nuclear war (PyeongChang 2018, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump) but never did we imagine being ambushed by a raging pandemic”, said Paul JJ Payack, President and Chief Word Analyst for the Global Language Monitor.

For comparison purposes, GLM created the Economic Value Unit (EVU) that estimates in dollar terms the size of the value leak for each of the TOP Sponsors during the current quadrennial. In like manner, it estimates the value gained by the NAMs or Ambush Marketers. According to the latest numbers, the mean score for The Top Olympic Partners was 71.43 BAI against a 69.94 score for the Non-affiliated Marketers. This means that the Non-affiliated Marketers are reaping nearly the same benefit despite their lack of official association with the Olympic Games.

The study pulls data from hundreds of millions of data points from across the internet and the top 380,000 print, electronic news media outlets, and social networking sites, analyzing sentiment, context and a host of other factors to determine which Worldwide Olympic Partners are most closely associated with the Olympic Games, and which brands are being closely associated with the coronavirus pandemic or both. The findings are published in the Tokyo 2020 Ambush Marketing Report, which is now available for order.

Going a step further, the GLM study also includes an analysis on how closely brands and a number of their ‘ambush’ competitors are being affected by the coronavirus, which has been a global concern in the lead up to the Tokyo Games.

“We actually found a remarkable correlation between the coronavirus and the Worldwide Olympic Partners,” Payack continued. “A number of the Brands (and ambushers), actually had nearly as many citations linked to the coronavirus as to the Games themselves. In a few cases, citations to the coronavirus actually exceeded those to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.”

Early this year, the IOC Executive Board expressed its full commitment to the Tokyo Games, scheduled to take place from July 23 to August 8, reporting that all protective measures are being taken to address the coronavirus situation. Lately, they banned all non-athletic visitors from the Games. This situation has steadily deteriorated.

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