The 2012 Summer Olympics were the first to be streamed online in their entirety, offering marketers huge data analytics opportunities from social media, mobile device, and live video streams. NBC research president Alan Wurtzel reported to paidContent Aug. 2 that:
• 60 percent of video streams are happening “online” (i.e., desktop web), while another 45 percent is (from) a combination of tablet and phones.
• Nearly 4.6 million people have gone to NBC’s mobile site, and apps for the games have been downloaded more than 6 million times.
• 64 million video streams (to date Aug. 1 were) served across all platforms.
This is an exponential Olympics marketing data increase over the 2008 Olympics, where less than half the audience owned smartphones, the iPad and other tablets had not been launched and Twitter ranked 23rd among social media sites. Speaking of Twitter, the official 2012 Summer Olympics handle @London2012 had more than 1.6 million followers. Social media networks played a pivotal role in impacting audience engagement this year. Jason Falls, CEO of SocialMediaExplorer, told ESPN’s Outside the Lines Aug. 2 that social media is “deteriorating away the ‘old guard.’ No longer are the broadcast networks and the primary media outlets the gatekeepers of information.”
As shown by the “MediaCom Sport Olympic Twitter Tracker, powered by Brandwatch,” official 2012 Summer Olympics sponsors waged their own competition to win social media traffic and positive sentiment from fans. Twitter feedback demonstrated in this Examiner analysis that P&G’s “Proud Sponsors of Moms” marketing campaign struck a harmonic chord between the company’s and the Olympics’ brand identity, while negative sentiment prevailed for McDonald’s, whose nutritionally challenged brand contradicted Olympic health values. Meanwhile, unofficial sponsors used guerilla marketing campaign tactics to evade strict IOC guidelines, such as BMW’s quarter-scale, remote-controlled MINIs shuttling track-and-field equipment across the Olympic playing field and Nike’s neon yellow footwear pulling focus from official sponsor Adidas.
With so many new streams of Olympics-related data available, we expected to see a lot of data analytics showing what results marketers were achieving. The reality is we’ve seen little. And, according to AdWeek, we are not alone. In a study released by AT Kearny Aug. 8, the firm found:
• 50 percent of advertising brands failed to make any reference to digital world
• Only 10 percent of advertisers included Facebook, Twitter or YouTube links
• Three of the 11 global sponsoring brands didn’t advertise at all
Perhaps surprising…but all too true, too often.
This is exactly why we founded Anametrix. We are marketers, and we know how difficult it has been to connect, analyze and visualize large volumes of live, streaming data with web-analytics, marketing-automation, CRM, and other important data. We know it is even harder to make sense of all this data and be able to discover new truths about customers to course correct a marketing campaign in real time and improve ROMI (return on marketing investment) in a fundamental way.
What kind of marketing campaign results have you seen regarding the 2012 Summer Olympics? What can you share about any Olympics campaigns in which you participated? How will the 2012 Summer Olympics affect how marketers run campaigns and conduct data analytics during this year’s holiday season? Let’s continue the conversation! Post a comment to this blog. Visit Anametrix in San Francisco Aug. 29 for the Digital Analytics Association’s Symposium “What’s Next – The Future of Digital Analytics.” And follow SocialMediaExplorer’s Jason Falls (@jasonfalls) like we do for more great insights on this topic.