With the opening ceremony for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics less than three months away, we’re already beginning to see some early Olympic-themed advertising on national TV. Although the spots are still few and far between, we expect the volume to pick up considerably in the weeks ahead. In fact, during the three months preceding the London 2012 Summer Olympics, advertisers aired 74 unique, new Olympic-themed spots, 29 of which first aired during the final month before the games began. If Sochi follows the same pattern, then TV viewers will be treated to an increasing volume of Olympic-themed ads over the next three months.
The London Olympics provided some interesting lessons on the effectiveness of Olympic-themed advertising. We have a wealth of data on the topic. Download our Olympic Infographic here to get a glimpse. We identified 167 unique Olympic sponsor ads (plus another 41 non-sponsor ads excluded from this post) and analyzed their effectiveness across demographics, ad durations, industries, categories, brands, ad themes, and sponsorship levels. In this blog post, we’ll focus on brand performance, and we’ll list out the top 10 ads from last summer’s games.
Are you ready to compete on the world’s advertising stage for Sochi 2014? Get ready with a look back at London 2012.
Procter & Gamble earns the gold medal
Olympic-themed spots were aired by 18 sponsors and 9 other brands leading up to and during the 2012 summer games. These brands included both official worldwide sponsors and sponsors of Team USA (e.g., Procter & Gamble, McDonald’s, BMW) and non-sponsors (e.g., Subway, Puma, Burger King) who used “borrowed equity” to compete – meaning they aired ads that featured former Olympians or obvious implications of London and the Games. As shown in Chart 1 below, among all “broad portfolio” brands – i.e., those that aired at least five unique Olympic-themed ads – Procter & Gamble Corporate had the highest average Ace Score (596), followed by Coca-Cola (579) and Visa (571). P&G, which was also the highest volume Olympic-themed advertiser, earned the gold medal thanks to its highly emotive “Thank you, Mom” commercials. Coke was a strong silver medalist, due in part to its series of “Support Our Athletes” spots. And Visa earned bronze with an athlete-laden call to “Join Our Global Cheer”.
Chart 1: Top Olympic Advertising Performers by Brand
But on a relative basis, the list is somewhat different. Comparing each brand’s Olympic-themed Ace Score average to its full-year category Ace Score norm put Visa at the top, with its ads gapping +11.5% above the credit card category norm. Procter & Gamble’s Cover Girl came in second at +9.9%, followed by Coca-Cola at +5.4%. Visa’s strong performance on both an absolute and the all-important relative basis is commendable. As noted in the BLACKBOOK, the Credit Card category tends to score lower than most other categories, with an 2012 Ace Score average of 511 vs. the cross-category average of 529. In the same spirit, Cover Girl’s Olympic-themed ads cleared the demographic hurdles that tend to keep Cosmetics ads among the lowest scoring in our database.
Chart 2: Top Olympic Advertising Performers by Brand based on Gap to Category Norm
The ranked list of the 10 highest scoring Olympic-themed ads as of the Games’ Closing Ceremony underscores the effectiveness of Corporate Branding ads, especially for General Electric and Procter & Gamble. As we noted at the close of the London Olympics in 2012, although GE takes the #1 spot, P&G dominates the highest ranked list with 3 of the top 10 ads. Coca-Cola then nudges in at fifth place, earning just one point higher than Chobani’s high-scoring ad.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that we run a program specifically for the Olympics. Subscribers to the program in 2012 used the data in their war room efforts to evaluate creative, make rotational decisions, and report out on performance both on a brand and category level. Some even saw fit to call that out in their quarterly earnings report. The data were deemed so useful, that six months later it was the source of a Super Bowl audible for one client – but that’s a story best shared over a pint of Guinness.
