The Digital Olympics
The Digital Olympics
This month in Thailand has been deemed ‘Digital Olympics’ for the advertising industry, which proves the serious online consumption surrounding the masses for social media. We would be happy if the Olympics were a yearly event and noticed the significant shift in brands actively utilizing their sponsorship license in regards to the London Olympics compared to 2008. With the world’s largest brands investing 15% of their marketing budgets on digital, it is estimated that a single Olympic campaign costs anywhere from $30 million to $50 million equating to the cost of ten 30-second Super Bowl commercials. We’ve rounded up some main brands leaning towards digital and social media, driven mainly by the change in the media landscape.
Brands can expect more leniencies when it comes to Olympic licensing as they are allowed to acquire more rights to use branded content. Brand sponsorships in the form logos, music, mobiles, micro, and other kinds of social media are yielding significant results on ROI and garnering more fans for companies. Such content oriented media are popping up all over social media channels such as YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, among others, which are becoming more valuable in terms of gaining social media presence.
The radical change in medium can be attested by comparable figures from this graph exhibiting YouTube as an expansive video viewing outlet with over 4 billion YouTube views per day opposed to 133 million in merely four years rivaling any country population in both size and scope. Not surprisingly enough, even the official Olympic Channel up over on YouTube has over 46 million views and 360,000 subscribers.
Also the brand winners for the top Google search results are P&G, Visa, and Coke in that order. We did a quick search on Google and the first three pages were infiltrated by the above brands embracing the search engine.
Also, this chart points out the channels used by top Olympic sponsors, with corporate sites in the lead followed by YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook pages close behind.
Visa also launched the first global Olympics digital marketing campaign in May, the first of its kind, the ‘Go World’ promotion. The card purveyor used its digital channels allowing fans the chance to score a trip to future Olympics games, promoting sweepstakes while engaging fans through a Facebook application to cheer on their favorite athletes. Didn’t win anything? Don’t worry; fans have the experience of sharing their personal Olympic experience with the world, courtesy of Visa. The company has been a Worldwide Olympic Games Sponsor for over two decades and this special Olympic-themed global campaign is no exception. All Visa cardholders , Olympic and Paralympic Games fans, and even Team Visa sponsored athletes can happily take full usage of Visa products worldwide. Visit the Facebook page here to submit photos, videos, and text cheers (one-click cheers via Visa’s Cheer application, over 28 million cheers!), and watch the ‘Go World’ video here. Also view and share video content on Visa’s ‘Go World’ YouTube channel here as well as tweet the campaign’s hashtag #VisaGoWorld on Twitter @TeamVisa here.
As the Olympics comes to a close and we already anticipate the next one, all of the world’s population will be more connected on their smartphones and tablets meaning bigger opportunities for brands to fully take advantage of the global audience. Brands will have to recreate and come up with entirely new innovative ways to utilize cross-digital platforms to build long term brand affinity centered around ginormous events as such.
Credit: Pappas.com, infographic here, FastCoDesign.com, original article here