Ahead of the Winter Games, Autodesk kicks off its first-ever Olympics marketing effort

Paralympic snowboarder Mike Schultz, Olympic speed skater Erin Jackson, and Olympic freestyle skier Colby Stevenson are all among the best athletes in the country. They are also star examples of how athleticism and engineering and technology meet.

With less than 100 days to go until the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics, Autodesk, a Team USA sponsor, is running a campaign starring Schultz, Jackson, and Stevenson that highlights the overlap between elite athletes and professionals like engineers, architects, and designers who use the platform.

“There’s such a parallel with the Olympians,” Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder told Marketing Brew. “Think about the process and the journey and all that goes into making these athletes ready to win…This campaign is really about the makers behind the medals, whether it’s the athletes, the engineers, the builders, everybody who helps to turn this imagination into reality.”

Winter wonderland

The campaign marks Autodesk’s first foray into Olympic-related marketing, and it rolled out Oct. 29, exactly 100 days until the Winter Games. Created by Autodesk’s creative and media agency of record, Giant Spoon, the 30-second spot, part of the brand’s “Let There Be Anything” content series, shows Schultz, Jackson, and Stevenson training and competing, with Autodesk tools overlaid on some of the shots.

The ad is meant to feel “optimistic” and “inspiring,” Ian Grody, chief creative officer at Giant Spoon, told us, and is ultimately meant to encourage more people to use Autodesk, Treseder said. The idea started with a Venn diagram of Olympians and Autodesk users, according to Grody, and the team landed on the idea that for both groups, “every millimeter counts.”

“We realized that there is a lot they have in common,” he said. “They are two groups of people where precision means everything.”

Treseder said she wanted athletes that authentically connected to the brand, and all three fit the bill. After Schultz lost his leg in a biking accident in 2008, he designed and built his own prosthetic leg and went on to start a company, BioDapt, that manufactures lower-limb prosthetics. Jackson, meanwhile, has an engineering degree and “plans to pursue a career in biomechanics,” according to Autodesk. And Stevenson’s doctors used design technology to reconstruct his skull following a nearly fatal car crash in 2016.

“You simply couldn’t cast just another Olympic athlete” for this campaign, Grody said.

The ad uses a combination of archival competition footage and close-up shots of the athletes in action on a studio set that the Autodesk team built in Canada, complete with an artificial ski slope and ice rink, where Grody’s team used a special camera with an “extremely high frame rate” to capture details like individual particles of snow falling through the air, he said.

The campaign is set to run through the Winter Games across TV and online platforms, including YouTube, Meta, and LinkedIn.

Summer days

While Autodesk isn’t an official sponsor of Milan Cortina, the company is deeply involved with LA28, where it is the “official design and make platform” of the Games; Treseder said the brand is already strategizing how to show up during the Summer Games. As part of its LA28 partnership, Autodesk is leveraging its tech to help organizers realize their goal of putting on the games without building any new permanent venues, ideally making the event “the most sustainable games ever,” Treseder said.

With headquarters in California, that mission is quite literally close to home for the brand, and Treseder said she also hopes to find ways to “contribute to the community” as the Games approach. Athlete partnerships will serve as another throughline for Autodesk from Milan Cortina through to LA, she added.

“This is the beginning of what is going to be a long tail of telling the stories of how the Games are being designed and made, and there’s so much interest in that, from what’s happening with the stadiums to the fan experiences,” Treseder said.