Brand activations at Milan-Cortina 2026: what actually worked

The 2026 Winter Olympics closed on 22 February, and the numbers were substantial: around 500,000 visitors passed through the Fan Villages, 5.4 million took in the competition venues, fan zones and torch relay in person, and 2.6 billion followed the Games worldwide. With more than 40 sponsors competing for that attention, the activations that stood out had one thing in common. They sent visitors home with something personal.

The ground: six Fan Villages and an Olympic Boulevard

Most of the public activation happened outside the ticketed venues. The organisers ran free Fan Villages in Milan (Piazza del Cannone), Cortina, Bormio, Livigno, Predazzo and Brunico, with big screens, sponsor stands and live activities. In Milan, an Olympic Boulevard ran from Central Station through Parco Sempione to the Arco della Pace, past the Duomo and the Sforza Castle, carrying the cauldron, the official megastore and the partner activations. That footfall arrived early: the Fan Villages logged more than 100,000 visitors in the first four days.

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The activations people queued for handed them a takeaway

Look at what the biggest partners built and a pattern shows up. Coca-Cola's THE PEAK ran across the Milan, Cortina and Livigno fan zones, with a photo alongside the Olympic Torch and a personalised Coca-Cola can engraved with the visitor's face and name. Samsung built Samsung House in Palazzo Serbelloni around an Olympic Victory Selfie station. Alibaba's Wonder on Ice at the Sforza Castle turned a visitor's photo into an AI avatar and then a short AI-generated video with that avatar as the star.

Different budgets, same idea. A visitor gave a photo and walked away with a personalised, branded object or clip that was theirs to keep and post. The queue formed for the takeaway rather than the signage.

The houses opened their doors

The other shift was access. Casa Italia opened to the public for the first time as a cultural exhibition rather than a closed hospitality suite. Omega ran its first dedicated Winter Games house in a host city, the Netherlands brought its long-running supporters' house back as TeamNL House, and more than a dozen national committee houses operated across Milan, many of them public. Airbnb went a step further and sold 26 athlete-led Experiences that kept running after the closing ceremony. Corona Cero, Descente, TCL and Eli Lilly all ran their own named builds in the city.

The trade press read it plainly: experiential has become the core of Olympic sponsorship, and the spaces are built to capture first-party data and to outlast the Games rather than to run for a fortnight and disappear.

The footprint reached well beyond Italy, too. Team Canada ran a free FanFest across Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Montreal during the Games, with big screens, partner activations and fan photo experiences for supporters who never left home. For a sponsor, that is two audiences from one tournament: the crowd in the host cities and the fan zones back in each competing nation.

Where an AI photo booth fits the mix

The through-line at Milan-Cortina is the same thing our booths are built to do: turn a guest into a personalised, brand-safe collectible on site. Coca-Cola engraved a can, Alibaba generated an avatar video, and both understood that the shareable takeaway is the activation. An AI photo booth delivers that pattern without a pavilion in a castle. A guest has their photo taken, the AI places them in winter-sport styling or on the podium, sponsor logos render at print quality on the approved template, and they leave with a printed card in a display case plus a share-ready digital file. The output is fixed to a brand-safe design, so nothing off-brand can be generated, and guest images are deleted after the event.

The format already carries this kind of load at sports events. At a Lenovo activation in London we printed 800+ personalised cards in four hours, each boxed in a display case. When Paramount+ ran an AI portrait booth at the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Austin and Mexico City, guests generated 6,522 unique portraits, and demand carried it from one city to a second. For a sponsor that wants the Alibaba effect at a fraction of the build cost, a booth is the practical route to the same personalised, on-brand keepsake.

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What this sets up for the French Alps 2030

Milan-Cortina proved the personalised takeaway is what fans queue for and share. The Winter Games return to the French Alps in 2030, and the brands planning now are the ones deciding what that takeaway will be. If it is a personalised collectible you are after, get in touch and we will scope a booth to your fan-zone footprint, or try the demo to see a card first.