Olympics Advertising: Find Out Who Won Gold In The Ad Race

As the glory of global athletic competition fades, perhaps the most important event remains unresolved: Which official sponsors squeezed the maximum return from their Olympics advertising dollars in the social media Olympics 2012? That is, until now. Unruly, a social video insight firm with offices all over the Western world, combined two of our favorite things – infographics and interactive – to launch the Unruly Interactive Brand Tracker Infographic (read that with a dramatic reverb effect).

The interactive infographic pits the top official sponsors who participated in 2012 Olympics advertising against each other in an epic animation death match (ok, it’s more like a friendly cartoon). The tool tracks the number of shares for each sponsor’s content across Twitter, Facebook and blogs using data from Unruly’s Viral Video Chart. With more than 150 million tweets about the Olympics in 16 days, the competition was intense.

The Olympic advertising winner? It’s P&G (you know, they make all the stuff under your kitchen sink and in your bathroom) taking gold with nearly 2.5 million shares by creating their “Proud Sponsor of Moms” campaign. The videos are a steady diet of warm and fuzzy emotional stories, including their top video that pays tribute to the moms all over the world who raise Olympians. Adidas took silver with about 250,000 shares of some of the more candid spots from their “Take the Stage” campaign. The videos include UK athletes lip-synching to a Queen song and another that reveals how much people love David Beckham, especially when he surprises them in a photo booth for a candid picture.

Samsung did not disappoint in taking home the bronze at about 195,000 shares. They took viewers behind the scenes of planning the Olympics, with interviews/documentary-style videos of the people responsible for pulling off one of the biggest events in the world. Samsung also showed lots of Mr. Beckham doing cool things with a soccer ball and Samsung phones. Wondering how your brand can win the Olympics advertising race next time around? The key is to focus on creating media that people are likely to share, according to Unruly’s Sarah Wood. That means making emotional content that people of all ages can connect with.