Alibaba Pushing for Olympic Transformation

(ATR) Two years into its TOP Sponsorship with the Olympic Games, Alibaba says its goal remains to "transform the Games to be a digital Olympics".

Alibaba signed on as the first Chinese TOP Sponsor since Lenovo on Jan. 19, 2017. In the two years since the company produced two flagship activations in its two categories, cloud storage and ecommerce.

The company partnered with Olympic Broadcasting Services to create a cloud based service for Olympic rights holders. Last month, Alibaba and the IOC launched an online Olympic store for China in Alibaba’s Tmall ecommerce platform.

"Over the last two years Alibaba has launched a series of game-changing technologies…designed to accelerate transformation across the games and positively impact the way major sports events operate," Chris Tung, Chief Marketing Officer at Alibaba said in an interview with Around the Rings.

"We believe its benefitting organizers broadcasters, partners, host cities, fans and athletes."

Tung says the goal is to expand both services in the coming years, while continuing to seek partnerships in other ways. For example, Alibaba and Intel combined forces and recently announced a new "3D athlete tracking technology" that will be used during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and beyond.

The OBS Cloud service was designed to address issues related to "longer lead times, transitions in pre-production, remote testing and storage with space limitations and lots of investment on people on the ground", according to Tung.

At Tokyo 2020 broadcasters will be able to use the OBS cloud for the first time coupled with the athlete tracking technology. While, broadcasters will reap the benefit of new technologies Alibaba believes, the real beneficiaries will be those watching the Olympic Games on digital platforms.

"[The OBS cloud will] drive innovations for the viewing experiences that fit the digital platforms, so this adds a lot of depth and richness to media especially when digital media is concerned," Tung said.

Alibaba’s goal for its ecommerce Olympics store is to expand it beyond China to be a global online platform.However, plans for the expansion are not readily available, as the company hasn’t begun to fully review its Chinese operation.

Tung says that consumer feedback will be used to plot out the next types of goods available on the Tmall store, which right now includes only the IOC’s heritage collection and a smattering of Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 licensed goods. He says Alibaba wants to "play our part" in making more licensed goods available to consumers in China, and is working with the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee to allow that to happen.

Visa, the Olympics TOP Sponsor for payment services, is accepted in the store, as is online payment options such as Alibaba’s own AliPay. Tung said that mostly "expats" in China are using Visa in the Tmall store.

Later this year Alibaba will release its Tokyo 2020 activation campaign. In PyeongChang the company’s activation was titled "the greatness of small," which focused on small businesses on Alibaba’s platforms.

Despite global backlash to the Olympics in the form of cities dropping out from bidding for the Games, Tung says the company’s mission to digitize the Olympics is a productive partnership, worth deepening.

"Young generations are living in the digital world; we are in the digital era," Tung said. "Supporting the IOC to transform the Games to be a digital Olympics is what Alibaba could really contribute, which we are doing by leveraging our best in class technologies.

"As we move forward you will see significant changes in the Games and moving towards our goal to transform [the Olympics] to be a relevant one."

Written by Aaron Bauer

For general comments or questions, click here .

25 Years at # 1: Your best source for news about the Olympics is AroundTheRings.com , for subscribers only.