Everyone seems to have caught Olympic fever this summer, and in addition to this being good news for the athletes competing, this is also very good news for the hundreds of brands around the globe who have invested heavily in advertising during the Games. Make no mistake about it, the investments have been huge: NBC, the exclusive Olympics coverage provider in the U.S., reported ad revenue for the 2012 Games surpassed $1 billion ($250 million more than in Beijing), with $60 million of those dollars being spent on digital (3x the amount spent in 2004). Digital advertising also appears to be a gold-medal winner in the host country of Great Britain, where the Games are being broadcast sans advertising on the BBC, freeing up more dollars for digital.
As I think about the amount of money spent online (and to a much greater extent on TV and traditional media) during this brief moment in time, I can’t help but realize that these advertisers, much like the Olympic athletes themselves, only have one shot to get it right in an arena where so much can go wrong.
From hitting a target audience to making sure online ads land next to brand safe content, and from ensuring ads appear in geographic markets where their product is sold to verifying viewability, it is clear that there is significant room for error. But of course advertising during the Olympics also represents an enormous opportunity -- opportunity to reach a highly engaged audience, opportunity to identify strong performing placements and opportunity to optimize campaigns in-flight to generate the greatest impact. A global Comscore study involving dozens of the world’s leading marketers assessed the extent to which this opportunity for improvement in delivering online campaigns exists – and the results are eye-opening.
Having access to this type of data, which can be reported by publisher, placement and creative throughout a campaign’s flight, is just what advertisers need to capitalize on their “one shot to get it right” during the Olympics. Comscore’s validated Campaign Essentials provides them this access by delivering deep campaign insights and enabling in-flight optimization in a single tool so advertisers can effectively:
Today, many of our clients are using vCE to monitor and optimize their Olympic campaigns, and we are eager to learn about the impact of this tool on improving their results. What is perhaps most fascinating about all of this is that just four years ago, during the Beijing Olympics, there was little awareness of the issues around campaign validation and the tools for optimizing advertising results didn’t exist. Instead, advertisers largely had to let their campaigns take flight, cover their eyes, hold their breath and hope the investment would pay off. Just as the bar continues to be raised for Olympic athletes around the world, so too has the bar been raised for members of the digital ad ecosystem.
Click here to catch up to all the latest Comscore at the Games action.