Toyota plans to end, or not renew, its sponsorship deal with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) once the Paris Games are over, according to Japan’s Kyodo News.
The deal, worth some $835 million, is reportedly the IOC’s largest. Toyota is one of 15 companies in The Olympic Partner (TOP) program, which the IOC website describes as “the highest level of Olympic sponsorship, granting category-exclusive marketing rights to the Summer, Winter and Youth Olympic Games to a select group of global partners.” In other words, there is one TOP sponsor per industrial category. Other such sponsors include Alibaba, Allianz, Deloitte, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Panasonic and Visa. According to the contemporary report, Toyota’s deal was struck in 2015 and was supposed to last eight years – from 2017 to 2024.
People within Toyota, according to Kyodo News’s anonymous sources, believe that not enough of the company’s sponsorship money has been going towards support for the athletes or promotion of the Games. Toyota has declined to comment, but Kyodo News’s sources say that Toyota would like to continue sponsoring the Paralympic Games. This would, however, appear to conflict with IOC policy, which requires sponsorship to be all-encompassing.
The IOC, too, has declined requests for comment, replying to the AP as follows: “We have an agreement with Toyota until the Olympic Games Paris 2024. We continue to work closely together in preparation for Paris, and we look forward to bringing these plans to life.”
Toyota was also uneasy with the 2021 Olympics, pulling its Olympics-related commercials from the domestic market when the games were held in Tokyo after a one-year delay. The New York Times reported at the time that much of the Japanese public opposed the games, worrying that they could serve as a “superspreader” of Covid-19.
Adam Minter, a columnist at Bloomberg, speculates that the current unease has a different cause. “Toyota,” he writes, “won’t be the last company to walk away. Decades of corruption and other public missteps have made the Olympics no longer a simple, feel-good story for advertisers. Instead, they’re a growing reputational risk.”
The IOC says that the entirety of its funding is private, with 90 percent going towards the Olympic Games, “athlete development,” and the “Olympic Movement” and 10 percent towards “IOC operations & activities.” The private sources break down as follows: broadcast rights (61%), TOP program (30%), other rights (5%) and other revenue (4%). “Every day,” the IOC website reads, “the equivalent of over $4.2 million is distributed to support athletes and sports organizations at all levels around the world.”
