Archive for the ‘2012 olympic games’ tag
Salute the Olympic spirit
So the London 2012 Olympic Games have come to an end.
A spectacular closing ceremony last night – with music, song, dance, awe-inspiring stadium lighting and fireworks that made up the greatest show on earth – brought the past two weeks of competition to an emotional climax.
The sight of the Olympic spirit rising as a phoenix from the dying flame is an excellent metaphor to apply to the 2012 Olympics legacy in the coming weeks and months, not only in terms of the big picture politicians and others are painting about investing in school sports throughout the UK (“empowering a new generation”) and helping British businesses “reap the rewards”, but also for Team GB and the launch platform their success has built in these games.
All the doubt, worry and criticisms before London 2012 about our ability to host these games quietly vanished within days of the start, replaced instead with powerful and growing feelings and displays of national pride as we witnessed thousands of athletes from around the world doing amazing things in open competition, right here in our capital city and other places of competition around the UK.
Indeed, worldwide worry disappeared.
And we were suddenly proud to be British, uplifted especially by the achievements of our Team GB, collectively and individually – and that includes the 70,000 volunteers – with their selfless hard work, team spirit and determination to succeed, maybe even win a medal or two.
If government can enable the framework – that’s their prime job – then Team GB can be an influential player to kick-start the legacy.
As they say so compellingly, don’t stop me now.
Olympic benefits for corporate reputations
The past two weeks of the London 2012 Olympic Games have certainly been a time of drama, high emotion, success and failure, and a general lifting of the spirits to witness such displays of intense effort and much achievement by athletes from over 100 countries.
The positive focus on this wonderful sporting event has just about excluded any other news from anyone’s attention as our TV screens, newspapers and favourite social networks have given us so much to consume, share and interact with over all that’s good about humanity and society.
It’s as if we know reality will resume this coming Monday, so let’s make the most of it!
You could apply similar thinking about a corporation or a brand from being associated with such goodness, where such a groundswell of positive feeling and perception rubs off on that corporation or brand.
As marketing intelligence company Warc reports, that’s exactly what’s happening with regard to Visa, BP and Acer – three of the main sponsors of the 2012 Olympic Games – which have recorded the greatest uptick in buzz among US consumers, citing new figures from the YouGov research firm.
[...] Visa, the financial services provider, registered the largest improvement on this metric, as its index score rose from 8.2 points before the competition to 22.7 points once it began on July 27.
Second place in the YouGov rankings went to BP, the oil firm, which has been tackling negative perceptions ever since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010. Its total climbed from –5.9 points to 2.6 points, an 8.5-point lift.
Acer, the IT group, took third, improving by 5.1 points to 8.9 points overall.
Warc’s report adds that Coca-Cola, the soft drinks maker, accrued an additional 3.5 points, taking it to 24 points in all. McDonald’s, the fast food network, was also up by 2.3 points to 16.1 points.
BP’s rise is especially impressive, given the still-ongoing reputational challenges the energy giant faces following the consequences of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
I think a key element in the success of BP and the others Warc mentions is how such corporate sponsors have been presenting their corporate selves and brands’ association with the Olympics in TV and other advertising.
Take Visa’s example of explaining the economic value they say will result for London and the UK in general, following the games, as shown in this infographic (a portion of which you see at the top of this page).
In TV advertising, BP’s a good example of how a public perception of selflessness is positive, such as in this corporate spot shown on US television a few months ago focusing on athletes and their potential to win, with next to nothing said about BP’s business.
(If you don’t see the video embedded here, watch it on YouTube.)
BP has been showing similar-focused ads on TV in the UK.
YouGov’s concise report makes good reading as it adds commentary to the numbers including the other brands covered in the latest research – see the chart here (and check the three sponsors showing less buzz in the US than before).
Public opinion is a fickle thing, to be sure, but Visa, BP, Acer and others show that public relations benefits on reputation can result if you get it right. I wonder what such research would show for buzz about all these sponsors in the UK.
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Hey, Get Back To Work – ShiftPlanning Raises $1M For Its Workforce Scheduling Platform
Hey, what are you doing reading TechCrunch at work? Unless, of course, reading TechCrunch is your job. I know, you’re on a break, right? Okay, continue as you were…
ShiftPlanning, which offers a web-based platform to help employers schedule and co-ordinate their workforce, has raised a $1 million Series A round led by Berlin-based Point Nine Capital. This follows an undisclosed seed round last September, which we pegged at around $500k, bringing the startup’s total funding to just shy of $1.5m.
Along with Point Nine Capital, existing investors Philip Gude, Ken Fyfe, Josh Billesberger, Amos Billesberger, and Jason Morrison, also participated in this new round. In addition, Point Nine Capital partner Christoph Janz, also a previous investor, co-invested, while David Charron, VP of Sales at Clio, participated too.
The new capital will be used to “fuel the company’s growth”, says ShiftPlanning. To that end, it says that its workforce scheduling software is used by companies in more than 60 countries, seeing a “700 percent year-over-year increase in clients” since its launch in 2010, as meaningless as that is without raw numbers.
However, putting a little more meat on the bone, ShiftPlanning can certainly boast an impressive client win. It recently won a contract to be the platform used to coordinate scheduling of volunteers at the 2012 Olympic Games taking place in London right now.
Available via the web or dedicated apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry, ShiftPlanning’s features include file sharing, extensive reporting options, real-time schedule conflict avoidance, third-party integration, employee shift swapping and online time-clocking.
In other ShiftPlanning news: The startup has opened a new headquarters in San Francisco, and announced that Philip Gude has joined as VP of sales. He previously built the sales teams at Arkadin Global and Business Wire.
Okay, now get back to work.
How Even Your Small Company Can Newsjack the Olympics
The 2012 Olympic Games offer once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to put your company in the news spotlight.
Newsjacking is a term invented by David Meerman Scott. It means finding a way to insert your organization into a big news story. When you do that, you and your organization are as much a hot and happening story as the primary news event. Newsjacking is a real-time content marketing tactic that generates outsized results.
Because the August 2012 London Olympics are the biggest news story on the planet, effective newsjacking will make you a big deal, too.
You might think that only big companies would find a way to horn in on this quadrennial extravaganza. Not so!
A perfect newsjacking example is the newly invented Olympics exercise program created by the New York Sports Club. Their brilliant newsjacking struck me this morning on Fox. whose attractive and athletic correspondent, Anna Kooiman, actually went to one of their Manhattan clubs to demonstrate some of the Olympic exercises. The New York Sports Club got a good 5 minutes of fun exposure that buried dozens of their Big Apple competitors.
I’m sure they hired a PR firm to put them in front of the large Fox viewing audience. That may be vital in NYC, but probably not in your town.
For example, in our relatively small Southwest Florida market, your sports club could easily create the very same program and pitch one of our local stations directly. Our TV stations are hungry for fun, visual, engaging, and timely stories to fill the many hours of local news.
As the owner of a Naples Florida sports club, this single newsjacking effort would have put you miles ahead of your way too many competitors. You become the fun place to go. The place with the unique exercise programs. The place that everyone is talking about.
Newsjacking is a marvelous technique that, like so many content marketing components, requires lots of creativity but little or no cash.
Grab a look at this video that illustrates the power of newsjacking. I think you’ll be inspirted to invent some newsjacking stories of your own. If you move fast, you can go after an Olympic Gold in the individual newsjacking event.
Satirical Twitter Account @NBCDelayed Is The Best Part Of NBC’s Olympics Coverage
If you’ve grown sick of these NBC/Olympics stories, too bad! We have nearly two weeks of Olympics and their respective tape delays left. I don’t even want to count how many hours of delayed Ryan Seacrest that is.
Here is a wild, EXCLUSIVE, Olympic story that could only be found by top-notch journalists with Internet connections and Twitter accounts (where could we find people with those qualifications? Not in New Orleans).
Anyway, buried lede: A Twitter account, @NBCDelayed has been mocking NBC’s ill-conceived, tape-delayed coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games. The account has only posted 29 tweets, but they are comedic gold; starting two days after the opening ceremonies, it has attracted over 26,000 followers in under four days.
Here are some of my favorites:
BREAKING: American colonists announce independence, King to respond.
— NBC Delayed (@NBCDelayed) July 29, 2012
Michael Jordan and Dream Team win gold medal in 117–85 victory against Croatia
— NBC Delayed (@NBCDelayed) July 29, 2012
Tune in tonight for the Olympic Opening Ceremonies in Beijing
#NBCFail— NBC Delayed (@NBCDelayed) July 29, 2012
BREAKING: Dewey defeats Truman in landslide.
— NBC Delayed (@NBCDelayed) July 30, 2012
CORRECTION: Dewey doesn’t defeat Truman, Truman re-elected President.
— NBC Delayed (@NBCDelayed) July 30, 2012
BREAKING: Roman Emperor Theodosius bans Olympic Games, NBC delay to catch up shortly.
#394AD— NBC Delayed (@NBCDelayed) July 30, 2012
BREAKING: Underdog Jamaican bobsleigh team loses control and crashes.
— NBC Delayed (@NBCDelayed) August 1, 2012
Want more Olympics? Don’t worry, we are now running a delayed version of our delayed broadcast.
— NBC Delayed (@NBCDelayed) August 1, 2012
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait until Twitter tips off NBC, NBC files a complaint and Twitter suspends the account before re-activating it and apologizing. Man, wouldn’t that be a crazy sequence of events?
London 2012: Procter & Gamble understood it all
The American giant is one of the London Games’ 60 official sponsors. Likewise the other sponsors, and as ruled out by the organisers, P&G is not allowed to communicate within the Olympic locations. However the company managed to play its cards right. And how! In its online edition from 27 July 2012, French daily Le Figaro awards P&G a gold medal and runs as a headline: “Sponsoring: Procter & Gamble buzz champion”.
Worldwide and local sponsors bring 1.63 billion€ to the London Olympic Games organisers. This is indeed an astronomical sum which may make one feel dizzy but, with 96% of prompted awareness, the Olympic brand and its famous 5 rings is one of the most powerful brands in the world. For the first time for a Summer Game, P&G is entering the VIP club of the Olympic Games sponsors, while the entry ticket costs 50 million€. When one unpocket such a huge amount of money, it’s fair enough to expect return on investment. The true question is how.
P&G chose social media – mainly YouTube and Facebook – as a springboard for its messages with a tailor-made campaign.
“Being a mom is the hardest job in the world. But it is also the best”, tells us the video on YouTube. The aim of this P&G commercial is “to honor everything that all moms do to help their children succeed by showcasing the amazing moms behind Olympic athletes at the London 2012 Olympic Games”. Second aim: to make us cry… and, unless to be a potential matricide, this works like hell!
Comments on YouTube are ecstatic: “Best advertsing 2012”, “This is awesome”, “can’t stop watching this video”, and so many other positive messages. With more than 5 million 570 thousand views, this commercial (which has been put online on April 2012) is a phenomenal success. Thus, the Olympic Games seen from the point of view of the moms – P&G core target – work amazingly well. By making the choice of moms and emotion, P&G understood it all.
“Thank you, mom by P&G”, a special Facebook page is dedicated to the moms of Olympians and all other moms. Very frankly the brand – which adopted the signature “Proud sponsor of Moms” – states: we “may not be in the business of athletic equipment, sports drinks or athletic apparel, we are in the business of helping Mom. So we will be using our voice in the London 2012 Olympic Games to acknowledge Mom’s rightful place in the 2012 Games.”
P&G spoils its Facebook fans by posting daily updated content related to the Olympic Games. With “Raising an Olympian”, the American brand publishes moving video telling us the life of 5 Olympians and the 5 moms behind these success stories. Positive comments are raining down.
“Raising an Olympian”: Henry Cejudo’s testimony is particularly moving. Web users love it.
Hyper reactive, a real pro of communication, P&G community manager doesn’t run away from sensitive or controversial issues – even though the great majority of comments is very, very positive. As a web user posts: “stop testing on animals,” the community manager answers right away: “thank you for asking us about this. Our research policy is clear about this, we don’t test on animals unless required to by law. For us it is a last resort (…).” To another who is complaining that the Pantene shampoo makes her head itch fiercely, the community manager answers: “I’m really sorry to hear you had a bad experience with Pantene. I can promise you that Pantene is thoroughly tested and 100% safe. Please call our customer service at 1-800-945-7768 this morning, and they will be able to help you.” No post is ignored; everything is said in black and white, in full transparency. What a great community management lesson Procter & Gamble is giving us here! By livening up is Facebook page with rich and exclusive content, by being reactive, informative and transparent, here again P&G understood it all.
We take our hat off.
Apple Genius ads debut during Olympic opening ceremonies
Three new Apple commercials aired during television coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games in London’s opening ceremonies on Friday night, each of which starred the same Apple Genius character in what could be the kickoff to a new ad campaign.
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Having a Go at Winning London 2012 Olympic Games Tickets
With the London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies just around the corner, a few of us at the newly opened Integer London office thought we would have a go trying to win some tickets from two of the official sponsors.
Cadbury seems to have been on a steady build-up for years, priming us initially with their Spots V Stripes campaign in 2011 with the Challenge Bar, which split into three: “one for the spot, one for the stripe, and one for the winner.” It was an ambitious plan to get us all taking a side, and we loved its goal to get us all playing. In the run-up to the Olympic Games, they’ve brought the oldest mechanic in the book back–the golden ticket, in which shoppers could win one of hundreds of exclusive ticket packages (along with 1,000 further prizes instantly per day). Unwrap Gold first appeared on shelf around April on 18 Cadbury products. I didn’t unwrap gold in my trial, but my Twin bar was quite yummy. Turns out I can still enter a drawing for £500 as a consolation prize, but no tickets for me.
Old-school mechanics are all the rage as I found when I went on a search for those elusive prize tickets from P&G. P&G, an Olympic worldwide partner, has been seamlessly executing its multi-brand global Olympic platform across the globe with a single visual identity that appears across categories throughout the shopper journey. This is shopper activation at an unprecedented scale—36 participating brands across multiple categories—beauty & grooming, pet care, and household care. I took a trip to Tesco to see what I could see and discovered that the retailer, in partnership with P&G, was offering an opportunity to win one of 50 pairs of Olympic Finals Tickets. All I had to do was make a P&G purchase with my Club Card and I was entered to win (or I could text to enter). I didn’t win, but it’s a good example of how a sponsor can use its ticket allocation to persuade retailers to give the sponsor greater visibility.
Photo Source: Mail Online and Clare Cryer
Contributed by Integer London
NBC Links Up With Storify For Real-Time Curated Olympics Coverage Across Today.com And Owned Station Sites
On the heels of a deal with Facebook to promote Olympic conversations on NBC’s Facebook page, the broadcast network today is taking one more step to improve its social standing during the big sports event. It is linking up with Storify, the social-media “story creator”, to put streams of real-time Olympic content, curated by NBC journalists, across Today.com as well as NBC’s 10 owned TV station websites. An NBC spokesperson tells me that this is by far the “biggest thing” that NBC has ever attempted with social media.
NBC journalists — 40 in all that will be in London and elsewhere — will be mining content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other social media sites. It will be the first time that journalists affiliated with the local sites will work in collaboration with the NBC News team on an effort like this.
The Storify collaboration is one of the first big, public moves being made by NBC News in the wake of the announcing the end of the MSNBC joint venture, and is a sign of how it is putting more resources into its own newsgathering operation.
And it will also be a way of NBC further exploiting some of the other efforts that it is making in social media. Specifically the Facebook page will have features like reader polls: that kind of content can now get a little more currency in the Storify stream. This year might see the most “social” Olympics ever — with the IOC, broadcasters, national teams, Facebook and many more all vying for people’s attention online during the event; this is perhaps the first Storify integration we’ve seen among them.
“The 2012 Olympic Games will be more social than ever, and Storify enables us to capture and report on the social stories coming out of the Games in a unique, web-native way,” said Vivian Schiller, chief digital officer at NBC News, in a statement. “This joint project acts as a journalism endurance test for our teams, as they scour the web for the best content and update the page continuously from now until the end of the Games.”
In all, the sites that will feature the Storify stream will be TODAY.com, NBCNewYork.com, NBCLA.com, NBCChicago.com, NBC10.com (Philadelphia),NBCDFW.com, NBCBayArea.com, NBCWashington.com, NBC6.com (Miami/South Florida), NBC7.com (San Diego), and NBCConnecticut.com.
The move could really bring Storify into its own as a product recognised by mainstream audiences. Those who are newshounds, or social media watchers will already know the site for its role in creating narratives out of people’s conversations, observations, links and more. The company had already worked with NBC in the past. It partnered with Breaking News, part of MSNBC, last year to add it to the list of feeds that work on the Storify platform. Earlier this year, Storify partnered with Pulse so that its curated streams would appear as stories on the Pulse newsreading platform. Users can also subscribe to Storify on Pulse.
“The Olympics are a primetime example of how social media can help tell the story, as athletes and fans are reporting what’s happening in real time,” said Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify, said in a statement. “With all of the updates, photos and stories being shared across the web, organizations like NBC can use Storify to create a narrative and make sure all this great content doesn’t get lost in the noise.”
The people and social media challenges at the 2012 Olympic Games
Reuters reports that Anthony Edgar, head of media operations for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), freely admits that he does not know what to expect at the London Olympic Games following the explosion of social media, with some 900 million people using Facebook in 2012 compared to the 100 million who used the site just four years ago at the time of the Beijing Games.
“Yes you can’t hold a camera when you’re running down the 100 meter straight and do an exclusive broadcast. That’s for the broadcasters,” he told Reuters in an interview. “But you can certainly talk about it. You can certainly take photos of it. And you can certainly write about it.
“We’re having to deal with things now that didn’t exist in Beijing, with a voice that wasn’t so loud in Beijing. Everyone is allowed to film who goes into a venue … but it’s for personal use only.”
[...] Fans inside a stadium will be allowed to use their smartphones to film Usain Bolt on the track or Michael Phelps in the pool, but they will not be allowed to upload it to Facebook in a ruling that may surprise many tech-savvy fans who now upload clips on a regular basis.
I can imagine a near-impossible task in policing that latter restriction. What will officials do at an Olympic venue when hundreds if not thousands of spectators are busy with their mobile devices uploading stuff? Manually try and prevent it? Not a chance. Turn off the networks? Hmm, good luck with that idea – someone tried something similar in the US last year, which didn’t really work.
As some are predicting data traffic of 60Gb a second at the Olympic Park primary venue in east London – equal to about 3,000 photos – here, concisely, is what I think we can expect:
- Anyone with a mobile device and a network connection will be using it, no matter what, to spontaneously share their text, audio and visual opinions of what they experience at an Olympics event.
- Athletes are people like anyone else, and want to share too.
- Everyone else, wherever they are – at home watching TV, in a pub, the office, on a bus or train or wherever – will want to do the same.
- If anyone can’t get online to share because of no network connection, they’ll do that whenever they can get online.
An IOC member reportedly told the BBC recently that “the Olympics is one of the oldest social networks that has ever been.”
In that case, I hope a pragmatic and common sense approach is adopted by the so-called ‘brand police’ with regard to such sharing – even after reading what the Olympic organizers have published about brand protection during London 2012.
Organizers, please do go after the ambush marketers and the thieves of intellectual property, but please let go of control and don’t smother free expression by everyone else, whose words and pictures will measurably add to and enrich the Olympics’ overall record.
And above all, notwithstanding the comedy of errors characterized by concerns about security and more during recent weeks, let’s just enjoy the amazing spectacle of these Olympic Games, wherever we are!
Related posts:
- The 2012 Olympics TV experiences look very good
- Olympic transformation
- The trouble is, the 2012 Olympic Games start in two weeks…
- Can you really control who says what about the 2012 Olympics?
- The 2012 Olympics: tech on a huge scale