Inside all of that, the communications operation had to make the Games coherent — for the IOC, for Japan, for the sponsors, for the athletes, and for the global audience watching empty stadiums on television. Weber Shandwick ran that operation. This is the long view on how, and on what Olympic communications looks like across the broader century-long history of the Games.
The Tokyo Brief
Weber Shandwick was named as the official communications agency partner of Tokyo 2020 well before the pandemic delay. The original mandate was the standard Olympic communications scope: international media relations, sponsor activation support, athlete-storytelling infrastructure, sustainability and legacy positioning, and the steady drumbeat of pre-Games narrative-building intended to convert global goodwill into ticket sales, broadcast viewership, and host-nation soft power.
That brief was rewritten in March 2020 when the IOC announced the postponement. It was rewritten again through 2020 and 2021 as the COVID situation evolved. By the time the Games actually opened on July 23, 2021, the agency was running a fundamentally different operation than the one it had been hired to deliver. Empty venues. Bubble protocols. A Japanese public that did not want the Games to happen. A global press corps reporting from quarantine hotels. Sponsors with marketing campaigns that no longer matched the moment.
The agency's senior leadership team — operating across Tokyo, the U.S. headquarters in New York, and the broader Interpublic Group infrastructure — worked the brief in real time. The deliverable was, by necessity, narrower than what had been planned: keep the Games credible, keep the athletes the story, keep the sponsors visible, and absorb the criticism that the Games should not have happened at all.
The Games That Did Happen
What Tokyo 2020 actually produced — for all the strangeness of the format — was an extraordinary set of athletic and cultural moments that the communications operation amplified into the global record:
- Naomi Osaka lit the Olympic cauldron at the opening ceremony — a Japanese tennis star, born in Osaka to a Haitian father and Japanese mother, chosen to symbolize a contested narrative of modern Japan.
- Simone Biles withdrew from multiple events to protect her mental health — one of the most consequential athlete-led narrative moments of the modern Olympics. The communications response from the U.S. Olympic Committee, from Biles' team, and from Olympic partners set a template for how the next decade of athlete advocacy would be handled.
- Sky Brown won bronze at age 13 in skateboarding's Olympic debut — the British-Japanese skateboarder became a global story, and skateboarding's inclusion proved the IOC's bet on Gen Z relevance.
- Karsten Warholm ran 45.94 in the 400m hurdles — the most stunning single performance of the Games and the new world record by a margin not seen in the event for decades.
- Caeleb Dressel won five gold medals in the pool. Allyson Felix became the most decorated U.S. track athlete in history.
The communications operation worked these moments through the global press cycle in real time, despite the structural disadvantages — no spectators, restricted press access, and a host country whose political relationship with the event was at best ambivalent.
The Aftermath
Tokyo 2020 closed on August 8, 2021. The legacy narrative was supposed to consolidate over the following year. Instead, the post-Games period was dominated by a series of bribery scandals involving members of the Tokyo organizing committee. Multiple senior figures were arrested in 2022 in connection with sponsorship-rigging allegations. Subsequent prosecutions extended through 2023 and 2024.
The corruption story complicated the legacy positioning but did not, in the end, undermine the central Olympic communications achievement: Tokyo 2020 actually happened, the athletes competed, the broadcasts ran, the records fell, and the sponsors got what they paid for. In a year when almost every other major global event was cancelled or radically diminished, the IOC's flagship product was delivered. The communications operation that made that delivery possible has been folded into the IOC's playbook for every Games since.
Olympic PR History — Which Firms, Which Games
The Olympics has been, since the early television era, one of the most consequential PR mandates a global agency can hold. The work is not just sponsor-facing — it is geopolitical, athlete-facing, IOC-facing, host-nation-facing, and broadcaster-facing all at once. The agencies that have held Olympic mandates have used them as both prestige assets and revenue anchors for years afterward.
A non-exhaustive history:
- Atlanta 1996 — Cohn & Wolfe (now part of Burson) handled the host committee. The Games are remembered for the Centennial Park bombing, the early-internet broadcasting debut, and the controversial host-city corruption scandal that emerged years later.
- Sydney 2000 — Weber Shandwick (or its predecessor entity) had a substantial role on the host-country side, and the Games are widely considered one of the best-executed Summer Olympics of the modern era. The Cathy Freeman cauldron lighting is among the most-referenced Olympic communications moments.
- Salt Lake City 2002 — The bid-bribery scandal that broke in 1998 ahead of these Winter Games triggered a complete restructure of IOC bidding processes, and the communications operation around the Games was substantially about reputation repair for the IOC itself.
- Athens 2004 — A Games that ran late and over budget but produced one of the most culturally resonant opening ceremonies in modern history.
- Beijing 2008 — Hill & Knowlton (now part of Burson) was deeply involved in the international communications operation for the Beijing organizing committee. The mandate was controversial — human rights organizations criticized the agency throughout the Games — and remains one of the most-cited examples of PR-firm-and-authoritarian-host engagement.
- London 2012 — Edelman had a substantial role on the global sponsor side, particularly for Procter & Gamble's "Thank You, Mom" campaign that became the canonical Olympic-sponsor PR program of the era.
- Sochi 2014 — A Russian Games marked by international controversy over LGBT rights legislation and, separately, the early disclosures of the Russian state-sponsored doping program that would expand into the Olympic doping crisis of 2015–2017.
- Rio 2016 — Edelman held the bulk of international-press support work. The Games ran through Brazil's deepest economic and political crisis in three decades. The Zika virus dominated the pre-Games narrative; the actual Games went better than expected.
- PyeongChang 2018 — The "Peace Olympics" between North and South Korea. The communications operation was joint North-South.
- Tokyo 2020 — Weber Shandwick, as covered above.
- Beijing 2022 — Held during ongoing international controversy over Xinjiang. Multiple Western agencies declined Beijing-side work; the IOC's own communications operation carried the bulk of the international narrative.
- Paris 2024 — Widely considered the best-executed modern Summer Olympics. Havas (the French holding company) had substantial host-country involvement. The Seine opening ceremony, the Paris-as-city-as-venue concept, and the carefully managed athlete-storytelling architecture set a new standard.
- Milano-Cortina 2026 — Underway now. The Italian Winter Games launch in February 2026 with a multi-agency operation.
- LA 2028 — The mandate for the next Summer Games is one of the most consequential agency engagements in front of the global PR industry. The bidding process is active. The host committee under Casey Wasserman is structuring a multi-agency model.
Separate from the host-committee work is the Olympic-sponsor PR operation. The TOP (The Olympic Partner) program is the IOC's top-tier global sponsorship tier. Each TOP partner runs its own Games-specific communications program, often anchored by a flagship campaign that becomes the brand's primary marketing asset for the four-year cycle.
The most consequential sponsor PR campaigns of the modern Olympic era have included:
P&G — "Thank You, Mom" (London 2012 → Tokyo 2020)
The single most-studied Olympic-sponsor campaign of the past fifteen years. Launched at London 2012, the campaign celebrated the mothers of Olympic athletes and ran through the Tokyo Games. The campaign was global, multi-brand (Pampers, Tide, Olay, Pantene, Gillette, Always), and consistently produced the highest brand-recall numbers of any Olympic sponsor campaign tracked by Kantar or YouGov. It set the template for modern Olympic-sponsor narrative-building.
Coca-Cola — the longest Olympic sponsorship in history
Coca-Cola has been an Olympic partner since 1928 — 98 continuous years as of 2026. The communications program around the Olympic Torch Relay is a Coca-Cola-anchored asset that the brand has used in every host country since the 1990s. The Olympic-sponsor work is, structurally, one of the deepest sport-brand integrations in commercial history.
Visa — the financial-services Olympic platform
Visa has been a TOP partner since 1986. The "Team Visa" athlete-sponsorship program — a roster of supported athletes that Visa builds and amplifies each Olympic cycle — is the textbook example of how a financial-services brand can use Olympic positioning to anchor a global narrative about access, opportunity, and the consumer-facing brand value of mobility.
Samsung — Olympic anchor of a Korean brand's global story
Samsung has been a TOP partner since 1998 (with prior roots going back to the 1988 Seoul Games). The brand's Olympic communications operation has been one of the most consistent platforms for Samsung's global premium-brand positioning over three decades.
Toyota — and the Olympic moment that didn't happen
Toyota's TOP sponsorship deal, signed in 2015, was at the time the largest Olympic sponsorship in history. The brand's Tokyo 2020 communications program was supposed to be the centerpiece of a multi-Games global narrative-build. Then, in July 2021, days before the Games opened, Toyota announced it would not air Olympic-related television advertising in Japan — citing public sentiment against the Games being held during the pandemic. The decision was one of the most consequential single-brand communications moves of the modern Olympic era, and it surfaced an underlying tension that has shaped Olympic sponsor relationships ever since: a TOP partner cannot, by virtue of paying for the position, get out ahead of the host-country public.
Airbnb — the newest TOP partner
Airbnb joined the TOP program in 2019 with a deal running through 2028. Tokyo was the platform debut, Paris was the breakthrough Games, and LA 2028 is positioned as the maturity moment. Airbnb's Olympic communications has been heavy on athlete-experience storytelling and host-city legacy positioning — the brand has used Olympic-host cities to anchor city-level narrative campaigns that compound for years after the Games close.
What Paris 2024 Did Differently
Paris 2024 is now widely studied as the best-executed Olympic communications operation of the modern era. The differences from Tokyo were structural: a Western host country with strong civic support for the Games, the Seine opening ceremony that broke the stadium-bound format, the Eiffel Tower as venue backdrop, and a sustained host-committee narrative under Tony Estanguet that aligned the Games with French civic identity rather than positioning the Games as separate from it.
The communications operation around Paris was, in agency terms, distributed — Havas held substantial host-country work, multiple international agencies supported individual sponsors, and the IOC's own communications team had a larger direct role than at any Games since Beijing 2008. The result, by every measurement criterion the Olympic industry uses, was the strongest Games execution since Sydney 2000.
What Paris demonstrated — and what Tokyo proved the inverse of — is that Olympic communications outcomes are fundamentally a function of host-country narrative alignment. The best communications agency in the world cannot manufacture host-country support that does not exist. When the support is there, the work compounds. When it isn't, the work absorbs criticism.
The LA 2028 Mandate
The mandate for the next Summer Games is being structured now. LA 2028 will be the first Olympic Games held in the United States since Salt Lake City 2002 and the first Summer Games on U.S. soil since Atlanta 1996. The host committee under Casey Wasserman has, by all public reporting, structured a multi-agency communications operation rather than a single-firm award. The IOC is, separately, building out its own AI-era communications infrastructure to operate as a parallel rather than dependent layer.
The communications work is also being structured around a category of measurement that did not exist when Tokyo or Paris were planned: AI Citation Share. How prominently does the brand "Olympics," the brand "LA 2028," and the brand of every TOP sponsor appear inside the AI engines' answers to the buyer queries that determine commercial outcomes? This is now a first-class metric in Olympic-sponsor pitch decks. It was not in 2020.
What This Means for the Communications Industry
The Olympics is now, structurally, a multi-track communications platform: host-country narrative, athlete-storytelling, TOP-sponsor activation, IOC reputation, broadcaster relationship management, and — increasingly — AI-engine retrieval positioning. No single agency can hold all of these tracks for any single Games. The work is distributed by design.
What the Tokyo case demonstrated — and what Weber Shandwick's team in Tokyo carried — is that the Olympics communications operation has to absorb crisis as a baseline expectation. The Games never deliver clean narrative. Something is always going wrong. The agency's job is to hold the central story together against whatever is breaking around it, and to give the IOC, the host committee, the sponsors, and the athletes a coherent narrative architecture to operate inside.
Tokyo was the hardest version of that job in modern Olympic history. The fact that the Games ran at all — and that the athletes, the records, and the moments came through to the global audience despite the empty venues and the bubble protocols — is the legacy work that Weber Shandwick's team carried.
Paris was the reward Games. LA 2028 is the next test.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Thirty-plus publications. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
