How do you manufacture an Olympic star?
Take one amateur athlete — hopefully someone with a good back story — and begin drumming up consumer interest two, maybe three years before the Olympics.
Then sit back and hope for gold.
It’s a business model McLean-based Octagon has honed over the past three decades. The company, which has 40 offices around the world, has turned the marketing of Olympics athletes into a multimillion dollar business aimed at keeping competitors relevant long after the games are over.
This year Octagon is representing more than 50 athletes from around the world who will compete in the London Olympics beginning Friday. Of those, a handful may strike it big.
“The window of relevance for an Olympic athlete is very small,” said Peter Carlisle, managing director of Octagon’s Olympics and Action Sports division. “You take a relatively anonymous athlete, they go into the Olympics and the spotlight shines bright on them. But the spotlight will soon move to football, and we need to position that athlete to build a brand.”
Octagon counts Olympians including speedskater Apolo Ohno, snowboarder Hannah Teter and hurdler Perdita Felicien among its clients.
Eight years ago, the firm got lucky with Michael Phelps, the swimmer who won six gold medals in Athens. Octagon carefully built and managed his image, from an unknown swimmer who burst onto the international stage to become an overnight sensation. The marketing firm has worked behind-the-scenes to keep Phelps, 27, in the spotlight in the four years between one Olympic competition and the next. Now, as Phelps gears up to compete in his fourth Olympic games, he is in what could be the back half of his career, and the challenge for Octagon has evolved from creating Phelps’ brand to sustaining it beyond his competitive career.
Before he ever won an Olympic medal in 2004, Phelps had already sealed a lucrative deal with Speedo — an endorsement that included a $1 million bonus if he won seven gold medals. He had been on the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time, and had starred in a Visa commercial — all moves that helped build his celebrity.
“I didn’t view [the contract with Speedo] as just a transactional deal,” Carlisle said. “I approached it as, this is a 10-year plan that we have here. How can this partnership help us down the line? It takes a lot of work to make people think about swimming outside from the Olympics.”
Phelps went on to win eight medals — six gold, two bronze — in Athens. Immediately afterward, the cycle began again: Octagon had to maintain Phelps’s momentum in the public eye for another four years and turn him from an American hero to a global one.
Carlisle and his team began planning trips to China, where Phelps could meet with potential corporate sponsors, swimming organizations and the media before the 2008 games in Beijing. He made three trips to Beijing before the Olympic Games began and secured an endorsement with Mazda in China.
“We started right away in connecting him to China — we wanted him to have a deal in China so he could get over there and introduce himself to the country, the people,” Carlisle said. “It’s all got to be built up that way.”
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