London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton says there will be a “steady trickle” of Olympic sponsorship deals announced in the next year.
Deighton revealed that this week’s third-tier agreement with John Lewis had pushed the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) over the £600m mark for domestic sponsorship and licensing.
And he expects to announce more deals in 2010 to move LOCOG closer to its £700m domestic sponsorship target, which makes up more than a third of the overall £2bn budget for the Games.
The International Olympic Committee provides 30% of that figure, while ticketing accounts for a significant percentage of the rest.
Any remaining sponsorship deals are likely to be “almost exclusively” second or third-tier partnerships. As it stands, the Games has seven domestic tier one partners, six domestic tier two partners and 13 tier three suppliers and providers.
“Over the next 12 months there will be, the best description is, a steady trickle of deals as we go through piecing together the final bit of this programme,” Deighton told Press Association’s The Sport Briefing.
“More and more now our effort is switching from having brought on the partners to actually working with them. In some cases it is highly operational, like the deal with John Lewis.
“The big remaining ‘uncontracted’ component of filling out the full £2bn is around the ticket sales,” he continued.
“Of course, you don’t start selling tickets until 2011 so we’ve been doing a lot of work around how many we’ve got to sell, how we should price them and getting people excited about them.
“That target is about £375m and we feel very good about that. The biggest remaining part of my budget is the bit I feel most confident about because I think our tickets will sell like hot-cakes.”
