In the 1990s Home Depot was not the household name it is today.
The Atlanta chain was growing for sure, but it didn’t have stores in every part of the country, nor did it have the cash for a big national advertising push.
The 1996 Summer Olympics changed the calculus for Home Depot. With the eyes of the world watching, the company decided it was time to go big.
“We spent millions of dollars on NBC television and brought thousands of associates from Arizona to New Hampshire to Atlanta to participate,” Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank wrote in “Built From Scratch.”
“It was our debutante ball,” he said in the book, co-written with co-founder Bernie Marcus.
Twenty years later, Home Depot and other Atlanta Olympic sponsors — from Coca-Cola to UPS to Delta Air Lines — say the investment in the ‘96 Olympics was a good move that still pays dividends.
The Games, they said, put Atlanta on the map internationally and cemented the city’s reputation as the business capital of the Southeast.
That boosted employee recruiting by exposing the city to workers who might not have considered Atlanta, helped them to connect new business partners that were unaware of the area’s Fortune 500 roster and, some say, influenced other large corporations to move here.
And more directly, it added to sponsors’ bottom lines.
“Volume grew 20 (percent) to 30 percent during the two weeks of the games over what we would have normally done in a two-week period in July,” said UPS spokeswoman Susan Rosenberg.
How long that impact lasts depends on the company’s level of investment. Sponsorships cost $20 million to $40 million depending on level.
“The value of an Olympic sponsorship can be extremely strong provided the company has both a coherent and well articulated marketing strategy and the money to back it up,” said David Carter, principal of marketing agency The Sports Business Group. “For every official dollar spent or allocated to the actual sponsorship, several dollars need to be spent behind it in order to fully communicate and leverage the relationship with fans and consumers.”
‘Corporate Olympics’
Atlanta’s corporate tie-in was not universally celebrated. Some critics dubbed the Atlanta Games the “Corporate Olympics,” complaining of too much boosterism, of logos splashed on everything and of an overwhelming focus on capitalism as opposed to sports excellence. The city also was criticized for a hodgepodge of independent merchants pitching tacky bric-a-brac.
International Olympic Committee members at the time, including president Juan Antonio Samaranch, openly expressed disappointment at what they saw as over-commercialization. When Samaranch elected to not call the Atlanta Games “the greatest ever” — as is tradition — many saw it as a slight.
Ken Bernhardt, regents professor of marketing emeritus at Georgia State University, said Atlanta was trying to raise $1.5 billion to pay for the Games, which meant lots of corporate collaboration.
“Atlanta wanted to avoid a Montreal situation,” Bernhardt said, referring to the three decades it took the Canadian city to pay off debts of $1.5 billion tied to hosting the 1976 Summer Games.
Atlanta businesses said the Games brought advertising reach no other platform can provide.
“In all the research we saw, Olympic sponsors are perceived by the general public as being leaders in their industries — Kodak, Coca-Cola, and The Home Depot,” Blank, who carried the torch down Peachtree Street, wrote in “Built From Scratch. “We liked that affiliation.”
Delta, the official airline for the Games, carried the Olympic flame from Athens, Greece, to Los Angeles for the 1996 Olympic Torch Relay to Atlanta. Delta also collected money on international flights for children in war-torn parts of the world as part of its Olympic strategy. The exposure came as Delta was still trying to build a worldly image after its painful 1991 purchase of Pan Am’s old trans-Atlantic and European network.
UPS also was building out its international network in the 1990s. Rosenberg said there were also internal business benefits, as the company used workers competing in the Games to build company pride and showcase the caliber of its staff.
A united workforce
“It helped us unite our workforce around the world,” she said.
For Coca-Cola, a veteran of Olympic sponsorships, the ‘96 Games led to its relocation of the World of Coke museum to the newly built Centennial Olympic Park.
The site was Coke’s Olympic Village and at one time the beverage giant considered the vast parcel for a company expansion of its headquarters, just down the street at North Avenue, said archivist Ted Ryan.
But the company, which is the oldest sponsor of the Olympics — it became a partner in 1928 — decided Pemberton was a better investment.
“That’s our legacy,” Ryan said of Pemberton, which took off as a development roughly after the aquarium’s opening in 2005, almost a decade after the Olympics. “It’s created a fantastic visiting hub for Atlanta.”
