Field of dreams – Communications at the Olympic Games

By Chris Haynes

In our latest CIPR Sports Network webinar, Scott Field, Director of Communications & Marketing at the British Olympic Association, reflected on the Paris Olympics and the ever-changing role of communications.

His insights should help anyone seeking to learn from best practice in communications - whether working within sport, with sport, or any communications role – and core to his thinking were three great, personal pieces of advice for anyone in their comms career: 

“Work with people you want to work with; people who are going to inspire you and be good to work with.”

“Trust yourself; it's going to be OK. Nobody around you knows everything. Nobody's got all the answers. We're all searching for them on a daily basis.”

“You need to understand people; understand relationships and enjoy fostering relationships to get the most out of this world and this industry.”

Here, in his own words, are seven key things we learned from our fascinating conversation with a sports communications expert.

1.      FOCUS ON THE ATHLETES:

“My role is responsibility for all outward facing communications, marketing and brand activations. I’m speaking to all of our audiences all of the time to protect the brand and the brand narrative.  The primary tool in this is always our athletes and our fans. And the role is simply to connect the two as best we can without them seeing much of us in between.”

2.      EACH OLYMPICS IS DEIIFERENT:

“Those three games [Brazil, Tokyo, Paris]; the shape of them was just so utterly different.  I almost feel like our athlete communications were never as good as they were during COVID [in Tokyo] because you really had to think about it the whole time and you couldn't rely on the impromptu, the informal communication. Everything was and had to be so deliberate. If Paris was the TikTok games – or for us it was TikTok and Instagram - LA is going to be an influencer and celebrity games.”

3.      COMMUNICATIONS KEEPS EVOLVING:

“The biggest thing that has changed for all of us working in sport is the ability to deliver the message to the audience first-hand through our own platforms and our own content.  The brand marketing activations are now as important as the reactive press office work or picking up the phone to help shape our narrative. You can't drive interest [solely] through ‘legacy media’ where resource is much more scant and the outcomes are less guaranteed.”

4.      GREAT COMMS HELPS GREAT PERFORMANCE

“It's such an under-viewed area of sport and something that could be exploited much more. And clearly there are mental health benefits that can come with that, when you think about an athlete and performance. The start point has to be; not to hinder the performance environment.  I absolutely recognise that ‘noise’ of any nature can be very disruptive so minimising the disruption is such a key facet of what we try and do. When we go into a Games you want people to be able to focus on what they're trying to do… then also give the oxygen for the good stories to breathe.”

5.      THE OLYMPICS ARE A MAGNET FOR EVERY NARRATIVE

“All the world's media are there. All the world’s stories are there. So real live issues manifest themselves at the Olympic Games.  I absorb those questions on a daily basis.  I want to have a great dialogue with the traditional media because I want to help make sure they’re as well informed as they can be. You deal with incoming in a proactive fashion - we don't know what's coming through the door but we set up ready for that. I want sports press officers to be really focused on their athletes, on their events, but otherwise what we’re really trying to do is manage issues and stories to allow the sport to carry on.

6.      LOOK AFTER YOURSELF

“For those of us who work on frontline comms or particularly in crisis areas, it's attritional. It's not always ‘good’ work; you're not dealing with happy subjects all the time and you don't always get the outcome that you would like. I'm very lucky that I work in an organisation that is very grown-up and thoughtful about this. We have lots of support mechanisms.  Mental health and well-being is a huge challenge, not least for PR professionals who are sat on platforms like X all day, every day, having to expose themselves to the news. I'm very lucky to work in a very supportive organisation.”

7.      MEASURE YOUR SUCCESS

“Athletes are a really important element; listening to what works for them and what doesn't. We're looking at all of our brand metrics all of the time and the broader metrics tell us we come out of the Games in a good place across our digital channels. Also, we're a commercial organisation, so the bottom line also gives us a readout on how well we've done or not. The satisfaction of our commercial partners along the way is super important for us. Our brand is built on athletes’ stories, built on our ability to translate those fantastic stories of those athletes their resilience the hard times that you know the path that they've been on.”

Please do watch the full conversation HERE, give us any feedback and feel free to suggest other topics that you'd be keen to know more about.