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Which brands will take Olympic Games gold?
Come this Friday, over 8000 athletes from around the world
will be seeking medal glory, but they’re not the only ones in the running for
top-placed rankings. The Olympic Games, of course, seems to be as much about
athletic prowess as it is about getting brand messages across
to the masses of captive viewers.
And MediaCom Sport, together with Brandwatch, have created a nifty
interactive data visualisation tool and Twitter tracker to keep track of how
well the 25 Olympic sponsors are faring.
Data visualisation tool Buzz Board displays real-time
mentions of Olympic sponsors and shows the total volume of mentions
as well as the sentiment around the brands involved. Each sponsor is
represented by its own athlete-worm, with the adjacent number showing how many
Olympic-related tweets have been posted about that brand over the last 28 days.
Meanwhile the Twitter Tracker combines the social media
monitoring and analysis capabilities of Brandwatch, with MediaCom Sport’s
insight and performance indicator, to consolidate all mentions of the 25
Olympic sponsors on Twitter, awarding a performance score based upon a
dedicated formula (featuring sentiment, engagement and reach metrics), before
ranking them in a league table.
The latest results reveal British Airways as the top ranking
sponsor and McDonald’s bottom of the table. While the fast food giant experienced
a high volume of activity, Marcus John, MediaCom Sport’s global
head, says its positioning
can been attributed in part to bad publicity surrounding its monopoly of the
supply of chips in the Olympic park.
The London Eye, too, looks set to become a conveyor of Games sentiment via Twitter. Wheel sponsor EDF Energy has created a light show on the Eye, which will light up each night according to positive or negative games comments made via Twitter.
With top sponsors paying over NZ$100 million for a four-year
commitment, the pressure to perform is massive, but the financial gains could
be even bigger. But unlike previous Olympics, social media looks set to become a sizable sideshow that offers sponsors the opportunity to track their success like never before.
