London’s hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games caused an inevitable deluge of sport-related advertising – whether the brands in question were ‘Official Partners of the Games’ or not. Amidst the monsoon of press ads, all featuring desaturated shots of sportspeople looking a bit too serious, I noticed something: almost all of these sport-focused brands’ expensive creations signed off with nothing more than a hashtag as a call to action.

Whether we were being told to #makeitcount by Nike, #takethestage by Adidas, #winfromwithin by Gatorade or #witnessmyrevival by Lucozade (whose revival exactly?), it was clear that it was all about the hashtag. When this dawned on me, I was – despite working in digital advertising – rather taken aback. Read More »

Among the official Olympics sponsors Samsung has been named as the brand that did best out of the London 2012 games in terms of online visits, followed by Adidas, according to data from Hitwise.

Among the broadcasters there was no competition. The BBC trounced Sky News in that battle.

There was good news for non-sponsors too. While Adidas did well in terms of a receiving a good uplift in terms of online visits data from Socialbakers points to rival Nike, which was not an official sponsor, winning the battle for sporting social media engagement on Facebook and Twitter.  Read More »

Can this be a surprise? The seemingly draconian way that Locog is attempting to protect the rights of Olympic sponsors appears to be backfiring and is diverting traffic and attention to their fiercest rivals, according to data from Experian.

UK traffic to the websites of non-sponsors Pepsi and Nike had been declining in volume in the lead up to the games, while those of London 2012 Partners Adidas and Coca-Cola saw substantial rises.

However, the trend reversed this weekend following widespread reporting that the brand clampdown could mean that visitors to the games who displayed the logos of non-sponsor firms could be barred from entry. Read More »

Of all the head-to-heads scheduled across the Olympic and Paralympic games, which one will be the big story to come out of London 2012? Perhaps it will be the 100m face-off between Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake, or Jessica Ennis vs Tatyana Chernova in the Heptathlon, or even Oscar Pistorious vs Jerome Singleton?

Although these and many other high profile confrontations, have great importance for the athletes and spectators alike ; in my view the main event will be the confrontation between the Olympic authorities – and Social Media.

Taking nothing away from the endeavours of individual athletes, this is the main event because it may impact on the future funding and therefore the future success of the Olympic Games. More than this, the face-off between the Olympic authorities and social media, is part of a much bigger debate about censorship and freedom of speech, which is apparent across the world and in many other walks of life Read More »

Initially, early social networks (including Facebook and LinkedIn) revolved around connecting people via their ‘social graphs’. 2011′s winners were platforms and ideas originating from, supporting, and at times enabling, the formation of relationships around shared ‘interests’. This makes perfect sense, for it is less important how you know someone than how relevant this person is to the conversation.

The wide spread conversations on the Japanese earthquake, the Royal Wedding or the protests in Egypt and Occupy Wall Street did not revolve around people ‘knowing’ each other per se, but on the shared ‘interest’ people had in the events. The London riots did not spread via actual relationships between the different groups and individuals but around a (foul) concept. Yes – human interests, just like marketing communications that leverage social media, contain the good, the bad and the ugly. Read More »

Facebook’s Timeline feature has the potential to be as dramatic a change to the network as when the company controversially launched the now irreplaceable news feed. Unsurprisingly, brands are determined to cash in. There is quite a variety of companies using these apps too, it’s not just social networks and newspapers. Brands as diverse as Vevo, Foursquare, Nike, The Onion, and Pinterest have all launched new Timeline apps at South by South West in Austin, Texas.

Techcrunch point out that the data from the apps is of huge value to advertisers, and therefore Facebook. The data is structured, so instead of knowing the things that people merely ‘Like’, which is not always an accurate reflection of preferences or actions, these apps store what you have actually watched, done, or eaten.
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First up from January is Volkswagen’s Super Bowl teaser campaign, The Dog Chorus. No wonder the Empire has gone to the dogs if this is all Darth Vader can muster to strike fear into the hearts of the rebels.

An amazing idea executed beautifully. Now don’t get me wrong, I can see in the Twittersphere that ‘Star Wars’ themed ads are hitting overload – but this a nice follow-up to VW’s excellent ‘Dark Side’ video last year. Read More »

Go Viral’s latest list of the biggest viral videos this month includes appearances from Angry Bird, Siri on iPhone 4S, GoPro, Nike’s Jordan Melo M8, British Airways and the Hot Girl vs. Zombie among others. Read More »

Everyone loves a good story. Some people read them in linear form, on pages constructed of actual paper (hey! old school!), occasionally raising a mug filled with tea towards their mouths, and making deep, guttural satisfied noises in the back of their throats.

Others consume the narrative piece-by-piece, in mini-snack form, as delicious nuggets of a character-driven plot, each bite-sized chunk squirreled away somewhere inside their phone, laptop, iPad or other carriers of media, until appetite comes calling once again. Read More »

In my previous post I suggested that too many brands use social media marketing in a tactical rather than strategic way. Now I want to look at how social media can serve best when strategically leveraged to create customer value.

One of McKinsey’s frameworks for improving customer benefits suggests three areas of concentration: functional, process and relationship. Social media, as a mechanism to create customer value, can touch upon all three of these pillars and, by harnessing digital platforms and new ways of interacting with consumers, brands can create more value and as a result, willingness to pay. Read More »