With just one year to go until the Games commence, we thought it was good time to take a look at some of the debate surrounding the Olympics. We have been tracking the global English debate on the Olympics since January 2011.
Some of the key stories driving the debate included talk of claims from Iran that the 2012 Olympic logo is racist, which appeared in February and interest in June as customers began to find out whether they had been allocated tickets to the Games.
We expect the debate to increase in July as people seize the ‘one year to go’ opportunity (much as we did!) to discuss this great event.
For this post, we will be concentrating on the Worldwide Partners; VISA, GE, Acer, Atos Origin, Coca Cola, Dow, McDonald’s, Omega, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble and Samsung. We show the spilt of the debate among these brands in the chart below. Of these competitors, VISA generated the highest volume of coverage in relation to the Olympics between the 1st January and the 30th June 2011, marginally ahead of Samsung.
Figure 1: Share-of-Buzz for Olympics Worldwide Partners in the global English debate on the Olympics
However, when mentions are weighted for influence the order changes considerably, as we show in the next chart. Although VISA still remains the most prominent partner, Coca Cola and GE move to take a close 2nd and 3rd place while Samsung is overtaken and falls to 4th place. This shows that although Samsung had a higher volume of mentions than GE and Coca Cola, it wasn't discussed among influential stakeholders as much as its competitors.
Figure 2: Share-of-Influence for Olympics Worldwide Partners in the global English debate on the Olympics
When we break this data down by month, as shown in Figure 3, it is clear that the overall conclusions are not as simple as ‘VISA is dominating the influential debate’. We can see that interest in VISA peaked in March and has been decreasing between April and June as attention has shifted towards GE and Coca Cola.
Figure 3: Monthly Share-of-Influence trend for Olympics Worldwide Partners in the global English Olympics debate
Coca Cola drew interest during May amid discussion of the torch relay, of which it is a presenting partner.
In June, GE came to the forefront of debate among worldwide partners driven by the International Olympic Committee’s desire to make GE a top-tier sponsor.
Currently we could say that VISA has been ‘winning’ the Olympic Advertising Games, but VISA may well be usurped by GE shortly, based on the momentum GE has gained since April. With one year to go until the Olympics, it is still early days and it will be interesting to see which brands manage to make the most out of their relationship with the Games.