Who took gold in the Olympic media race?
Mike Baker, chief executive officer of the Outdoor Media Centre, investigates how the media made the most of the summer’s games.
So, how were the Olympics for you? Did they live up to the hype?
For me, perhaps more than anything, I’m just relieved by the complete absence of the disasters the naysayers predicted. There were no terrorist outrages, Zil lanes did not block traffic routes, the G4S fiasco was quickly resolved and the three hour waits at Heathrow immigration did not materialise.
Instead, the excellent volunteers did us proud – rightly winning the biggest cheer at the closing ceremony – and, of course, Team GB were a spectacular success.
Even public transport held up well and carried as many as 800,000 ticketholders on busy days and even then the passengers took it in their stride – my own worst experience being ten minutes on the Jubilee line jammed under the armpit of a man who had been at the boxing all day long and had had a few too many, but even he was friendly.
So who won the media war? Was it the first really convincing social media games, or did traditional media hang on by the fingernails to their ascendancy? The answer is a bit of both.
On the TV front, mainstream commercial channels were always going to struggle against the first-class BBC coverage – that was only to be expected. Against that, Channel 4 played a blinder on the Paralympics with their super humans theme setting high expectations for their coverage – which helped us all to expand our mind-sets for the better.
The press was able to showcase all the latest results and keep readers up-to-speed via tablets and mobile, as well as paper – and this was a great test of its new multiplatform capabilities.
Elsewhere in the virtual space, according to Econsultancy and Metia, more than one billion visits were made to the www.London2012.com and 150 million Olympic-related tweets were sent throughout the games.
LOCOG also accumulated 4.7 million online fans, including 1.9 million Twitter followers and received 150 million tweets about the Games. And the hashtag #supportyourteam was used in 1.55 million tweets, all amounting to some seriously impressive stats.
And I’m delighted to say that outdoor rose to the occasion too. The Olympic sponsors alone – so excluding Nike and few other notables – spent £70 million on outdoor advertising during the Games period. Be it Adidas or Samsung, Heineken or Coke, BT or McDonalds, there was a near continuous stream of sports-themed advertising which created a seamless backdrop against which visitors came and went to the Games.
Especially conspicuous were those advertisers such as Procter & Gamble, UPS, Visa, EDF, Holiday Inn and Panasonic who do not normally use outdoor as a lead medium. As a result, outdoor claimed 20% of sponsors’ expenditure during the Games, twice the share of display media that outdoor traditionally wins.
And as with press, digital outdoor was used far more than usual to update live content. One operator estimates that 25% of ads carried live-feed updated content instead of the usual 2% and Panasonic reputedly updated a single site almost 400 times during the Games. All of which totted up to the biggest revenue UK outdoor has ever known in a single quarter, fully £12 million more than the previous record.
More to the point, all the outdoor activity really caught the public’s attention. According to YouGov, 62% of Games visitors noticed outdoor advertising and 52% agreed that outdoor advertising added colour and vibrancy to the city.
Over half (56%) agreed outdoor advertising is a good way for advertisers to show their links with large sporting events and festivals. All of which tells us, do your branding visually, do it on a large scale, and do it in the active space where consumers are alert and attentive.
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Click here to watch a video showcase of the best outdoor advertising at the Games.