Where Will Olympic Athletes Pop Up Next?

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Over the past three decades, how many Olympic athletes can you name? Did your memory conjure up images of the medal ceremony or the face on the Wheaties box? “Being an Olympic athlete can be a very depressing experience: You spend four years grinding away for that one Olympic opportunity where you become really huge, if you’re lucky, for 3 or 4 weeks, and then you go back into oblivion,” said Boyce Watkins, a faculty affiliate at the College Sport Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Well, this ill-fated reality for some is far from the truth for those Olympic athletes who find themselves signing an endorsement deal. For these fortunate few, the real payday is only beginning. So who can we expect to see gracing the cover of our favorite breakfast cereal or energy drink from the Vancouver 2010 games?

Two surprisingly different campaigns come to us from our friends to the North. Falling right in line with their playful and sometimes sassy package descriptions, GLACÉAU vitaminwater added humor to the usual inspiring Olympian ad campaigns with billboard and facebook ads staring Canadian Olympians. One such ad reads, “Try vitaminwater. Don’t try challenging Michael Lambert. You’ll lose, even in your imagination.”

And lastly, the fast food giant McDonalds’ new ad campaign in Canada suggests that starting your day with a McMuffin or fueling up with a Big Mac is the first step to becoming a world class athlete. The slogan: “Now, you don’t have to be an Olympic athlete to eat like one”. See this new exploit of Olympic athleticism in the following YouTube clips…

An Olympic medal is certainly a feat like no other but to those who succeed in both competition and campaign, Cha-Ching.

Contributed by Allison Jobes