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Coca-Cola also launched limited-edition packaging to mark its sponsorship of Euro 2016, with cans featuring relevant star players for each European market and an additional series also featuring the team colours of each competing nation, allowing fans to show support for their country through their choice of can. It has been a busy summer for the soft drinks brand, with Coca-Cola also being one of the worldwide sponsors of the Olympic Games, for which it worked with Brazilian artist Romero Britto on limited-edition packaging designs.But whereas sponsors of sporting events usually see their logos emblazoned around the playing field to promote their association to watching fans around the world, the Olympics operates a unique “clean field of play” policy, which means sponsors have to be even more innovative when linking their brands to the Games. “Olympic sponsorship is different because we are not selling exposure, which has been at the heart of sponsorship for many years,” explains Timo Lumme, director of IOC Television and Marketing Services. “That means our partners have to work hard, be more creative and invest in the resources necessary to forge the right association. You can’t be a successful Olympic sponsor by being passive. It is always a dynamic process and the important thing is that this dynamism leads to a creative edge which has always kept the Olympic Games special and at the leading edge of sports marketing.”According to Osborne, packaging can be an important tool for brands when trying to innovate their sponsorship activations. “A big sponsorship will always come with opportunities to create competitions and prizes related to the event and the pack acts as an advertising poster for the promotion,” he says. “But over the past five years there have been numerous attempts to move the engagement level up a notch by using QR codes or Augmented Reality (AR) apps to add a new level of brand experience to packaging.”Osborne points to examples by the likes of Budweiser and Pepsi, which have both successfully used AR in recent years as part of sports sponsorship activations. Budweiser, for example, promoted its sponsorship of English football’s FA Cup by giving consumers the chance to virtually turn their 440ml can into a 3D model of the FA Cup thanks to a special AR smartphone app. Similarly, Pepsi launched an AR-enabled can for the 2015 Super Bowl that created a virtual locker room scene around the can when viewed through a smartphone app.“AR still hasn’t yet moved into the mainstream as a media channel,” admits Osborne, “but with the wave of interest and development now taking place in virtual reality and the Internet of Things, this could change, with AR living up to its promise to become ‘bigger than mobile’ by 2020.“The benefits to a seamless and high quality AR experience are clear: the physical and digital worlds combine to provide a multi-media experience that the consumer summons like a genie from the can. The technology and the designer have a lot to do to compete with the super-high definition TV and graphics that are also likely to be sharing the room, but watch this space.”Indeed, with more and more eye-catching limited-edition designs and exciting new innovations gracing sponsorship-related packaging, the sports events themselves won’t be the only things worth watching in the coming years. n ‘OLYMPIC SPONSORSHIP IS DIFFERENT BECAUSE WE ARE NOT SELLING EXPOSURE… THAT MEANS OUR PARTNERS HAVE TO BE MORE CREATIVE’TIMO LUMME, DIRECTOR OF IOC TELEVISION AND MARKETING SERVICESEUROPEAN CAN MARKET REPORT 2016 15SPORTS SPONSORSHIP