With the Rio Olympics kicking off tonight, tons of brands are excited to incorporate posts about the Summer Games into their social assets. Unfortunately, if you’re not officially sponsoring this event, you cannot. Yes, you read that right.

If you’re not an official sponsor, which essentially means providing millions of dollars through a planned sponsorship, you need to be following specific rules to ensure your business and brand do not get in trouble. 

Adweek wrote a great article, which details the rules restricting what brands can publish surrounding the Olympics. A few specific callouts:

• Business cannot use any official Olympic logos. 
• Business cannot use any of the Olympics’ trademarked words or phrases. These include: 
  • Olympics
  • Olympiad
  • Olympian
  • Rio 2016
  • And even hashtags – #Rio2016, #RoadToRio, etc. 

Here’s what you CAN do: 

Create posts that highlight fandom and patriotism that allude to the games. Ford is doing a great job doing just that and is certainly captivating audiences with their tweets and snapchats  – all without mentioning the Olympics.  

Bozell is here to help, too. Let us know how we can help shift your social strategy to still be part of these engaging conversations – but in the right way.