I followed the Olympic broadcasts devoutly.
The moments I remember most of all are the ones where my kids watched in fascination with Guy Muki and the judo team, and prayed they would win.
This family event sharpened for me as a manager and as a marketer the fact that without a significant investment - there are no achievements.
Being an athlete costs a lot of money, costs that are usually borne by the athlete's family members for many years.
Today the state and unions are not budgeted enough, and are far from being able to provide our champions with the full envelope needed to achieve significant achievements.
Great talents give up on the dream because not everyone has the financial opportunity to invest 60-40 thousand shekels a year in a professional sports career, which may one day return the investment.
Some of the solution can be found in the business sector.
Athletes have all the values a brand is looking for: reliability, authenticity, a source of pride, and above all - the desire to win and be first.
So we have to embrace them all the way, starting from the early stages of their careers.
Brands that learn to crack a common path to working with athletes will only benefit from it, and create real meaningful value for the brand and its fan base.
Everything is photographed much better with an Olympic medal, but it is important to remember that athletes compete all year round and bring a lot of pride that can be turned into real value for brands.
A company that knows how to give the athlete the right tools even in the digital worlds, will win an ambassador with significant added values.
Avishag Samberg, a bronze taekwondo fighter who won a bronze medal about three weeks ago, was content with about 30,000 followers before Tokyo and today she is proud of a quarter of a million.
The same thing happened to the other athletes.
The children follow the broadcasts of the Olympics, Avishai Paris
About a decade ago we used to divide the budget between TV, press and billboards, leaving a thin slice for digital, which has caught on big time and is now taking up a significant portion of the pie. I warmly suggest that brands regularly include an area of "social responsibility" or "empowerment" as an integral part of the pie - and there is nothing more appropriate in this area than supporting athletes. An excellent example of such an envelope is that of Bank Hapoalim, which has supported athletes for several years (even before they won Olympic medals), gives them monthly scholarships and takes care to empower them and integrate them into its commercial campaigns so that everyone is exposed to their successes, combined with the excellent slogan.
In recent years we at GARMIN have been supporting three Olympic athletes (Ran and Shachar Sagiv who represented us in Tokyo in the triathlon, and Girma said he represented us at the end of the marathon). We also support about 15 youths with tremendous potential to represent us at the next Olympics. From personal experience I can tell that just as they are loyal to the flag and the country, so they are loyal to the brand and its values, and so we all benefit.