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Above and below Branding is banned from Olympic venues, so Strongbow used patriotic packaging to connect to the event Right Carlsberg Export celebrated Euro 2016 with a can design featuring a football boot with French landmarks as studs Even those who have little interest in sport will have had two of 2016’s major international events on their radar. The UEFA Euro 2016 football championships and the Rio 2016 Olympic Games didn’t just enthral millions of fans around the world and dominate media coverage online, on TV and in print – their reach also extended to the shelves of your local supermarket. That is because while athletes in Brazil strove for an Olympic gold medal, and Europe’s finest footballers battled for the Henri Delaunay Trophy in France, marketers were doing their very best to promote their products by aligning their brands with these two huge sporting spectacles.The most visible of these are the official sponsors, who have paid significant fees for the rights to use each event’s logo alongside their own branding. In the summer of 2016, these sponsors included Carlsberg, the official beer of Euro 2016, and Coca-Cola, which has been a sponsor of every Olympic Games since 1928.The brand marked 88 years of its Olympic relationship at Rio 2016 with a global #That’sGold campaign, which aimed to celebrate personal winning moments as well as sporting excellence. As part of the campaign special-edition cans with silhouettes of athletes in action were issued.Skol – an official supporter of the Rio Games – launched three special edition cans inspired by the gold, silver and bronze medals. Over one million cans were produced, for purchase in areas sponsored by Skol at Olympic venues.The considerable investments that these global brands made for an affiliation with these events underline the extent to which modern sports sponsorship has become big business, with the global sports sponsorship market now estimated 12 EUROPEAN CAN MARKET REPORT 2016 SPORTS SPONSORSHIP