3 Powerful Emotions That Won Sochi Olympics For Brands

2014 has kept brands busy as they stepped out of the Super Bowl, straight into the Winter Olympics at Sochi. While the Super Bowl was a single event with a specific (albeit large) number of ad spots, the month long Olympics allows sponsors the chance to have more well-rounded campaigns than a single 30 second spot.

Unmetric takes a look at how they leveraged their involvement across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

P&G Pulls At Our Heartstrings With Unconditional Love

Widely hailed as the Gold medalist amongst Olympic advertisers, Procter & Gamble has been a consistent winner through previous Olympics, and continues to be one in Sochi. Their ‘Pick Them Back Up’ advert, released around the same time as the Super Bowl ad blitzkrieg, has received more views than all but three Super Bowl commercials.

On Facebook, the official P&G page – ‘Thank You, Mom by P&G’ was filled with Sochi related posts and the two posts with Engagement Scores* of 1000 were links to the video they had released.

Hashtag Analysis: P&G kept it simple but effective with their hashtags which were either related to Sochi, or to their ‘Thank You Mom’ campaign. Their four tweets with Engagement Scores** of 1000 celebrated gold medals at the Sochi Olympics with each of these tweets including quotes from the athletes’ moms. Their #ThankYouMom and #BecauseOfMom hashtags have a sentiment trigger that resulted in a higher rate of usage and retweets.

Visa Lets Us Share In The Joy And Glory Of The Olympics

Another Olympic Sponsor with a well rounded strategy across platforms was Visa. Their YouTube channel contains a Sochi related playlist comprising of 35 videos featuring various Visa sponsored athletes, like the one with Olympic Ski-Jumper Sarah Hendrickson which received more than 2.8 million views.

On Facebook, their Olympics related posts received great engagement with two of the posts, including the one below, achieving Engagement Scores of 1000.

In fact, their Facebook page received an Engagement Score of 781 which is more than twice the Engagement Score of the average Banking & Finance sector from North America.

As well as it did on Facebook and Youtube, Visa’s #everywhere campaign really found its legs on Twitter. The brand involved fans in mosaic collages of different athletes, included live updates and congratulated winners via Twitter, in a bid to increase engagement.Their tweets were favorited 114 times more than the average Banking & Finance Twitter account from North America and retweeted almost 70 times more, in the time period analysed.

Hashtag Analysis: Apart from the generic #teamUSA and #Sochi2014 hashtags, the brand and campaign specific hashtags – #TeamVisa and #Everywhere, received engagement scores of 892 and 989 respectively.

Visa has invested considerable time and effort in ensuring that their Olympics campaign gains the most bang for its buck. And it seems to have worked. With a growth rate of 16%, Visa enjoyed the highest follower growth rate among the official Twitter accounts of all the Worldwide Official Sponsors.

Coca Cola Proves That ‘America’ Triggers Engagement

Coca Cola had sizeable investments in both the Super Bowl and in Sochi, and in a cost-effective move, released a single commercial which captures the spirit and patriotism necessary for both events. Their “AmericaIsBeautiful” commercial had already gained about 8 million views in the week between the Super Bowl and Sochi, and since the beginning of the Games, has added about 2 million more views.On Facebook, their Sochi related updates received fair engagement but the highest engagement still came from their Super Bowl related posts.

Hashtag Analysis: On Twitter, the use of the hashtag #AmericaIsBeautiful dropped significantly after the Super Bowl, with a small spike visible at the start of the Games.

Perhaps a new hashtag exclusively used for the Olympics would have encouraged a fresh wave of audience participation.

The Final Tally

The Olympics bring out a shared sense of pride and patriotism in people and the brands that have capitalized on these emotions, like P&G, Visa and Coca Cola had very engaging campaigns. By efficiently using all three platforms, these brands made the most of their association with the Olympics.

Methodology

Unmetric compiled the report by sourcing data from its own social media benchmarking platform. Data and Insights on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were analyzed for the period of Jan 1st –Feb 24th,2014.