Aug
15th

Search Engines Compete for Olympic Audience

Posted by admin on August 15, 2008 at 10:39 am

The Olympics are here again – the age old tradition of torch lighting and athletes competing for the gold. But athletes aren’t the only ones competing anymore. Search engines are battling it out to see who can point searchers to the best coverage, the most in-depth information, and the most recent video of the Olympic games in action.

I decided to take a look at what exactly Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are serving up to Olympic searchers, and determine which search engine gets the gold. Let the games begin!

Ask

When searching for Olympics on Ask, the first result is the official Beijing 2008 Olympics website. Included beneath this link is a helpful drop-down list where you can refine your search by sport. From this list select a sport, such as beach volleyball, and you get TV listings for when and on what channel your sport is being aired.

Back to the first search result page. Ask also provides links pointing to event schedule, medal count and upcoming Olympics. On the right hand side of this page you can find images of Olympic medal winners. There are also links to news articles and a link to an encyclopedia definition of “Olympic Games” that takes you to a Wikipedia page.

Yahoo!

Searching for Olympics in Yahoo! reveals a variety of results, including a link to the official Olympics web site and to the Beijing Olympics page of Yahoo! Sports. There you can get up-to-date coverage on athletes, different sporting events, and shortcuts to the current medal count, news coverage, and videos. Currently, Yahoo! Sports provides about 350 different videos about the Olympics, the first displaying some very enthusiastic fans and a story covering ticket scalpers.

Yahoo’s homepage also displays some news stories under the Featured tab, and, at times, some pretty interesting Olympic oriented graphics around its logo.

Google

While Google’s logo has been covered in cartoon animals posing as Olympic athletes (monkey gymnasts, diving pigs, and a slam dunking Chinese dragon), the results returned from an Olympics query are a bit more reflexive of what is going on in Beijing right now.

Google offers a current medal count right on the results page, as well as a PPC link to Google’s Olympic homepage, which includes a link at the top of the page to a Google gadget. The gadget allows you to keep track of Olympic events, medal counts, and news via your iGoogle homepage.

Google also offers Olympic coverage through a YouTube Summer Games channel featuring news, recaps, and different aspects of Beijing. And to round it all out, Google also offers a mobile site: m.google.com.

Back to Google.com. Searching for one sport in particular? Simply type it into the query box (you may need to include the Olympics qualifier) and Google will return the score of the most recent game.

MSN Live Search

Before even performing a search MSN’s Live Search greets you with a photo of a recent Olympic event. Today it’s baseball. Beneath the photo is a link to recent news articles outlining up-to-date wins and feature stories about athletes like Michael Phelps. Above the fold on the same page is a selection of videos. Hovering your mouse over the thumbnails gives you a preview of each video. Judges may deduct points due to duplicate video clips, but all of this is available before you even search for Olympics.

Back to the Live Search homepage. After searching for Olympics, Microsoft provides a medal count table along with updated Olympic information through a partnership with NBC. Links to NBCOlympics.com are sprinkled in the results. Clicking over to the NBC site, you can find a complete listing of the medal standings.

And the Gold Medal goes to…

In my opinion, the search engine that displays the most information and provides the easiest access to medal coverage, videos, and news articles is Live Search.

However, I do believe Google gets a very close Silver Medal due to the variance in its results and the different outlets the engine offers to track and keep up with Olympic events.

Please feel free to submit your judge’s ruling!

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Aug
12th

Olympia Omega O My!

Posted by Leah Singer on August 12, 2008 at 5:11 pm

The triumphant horns of the Olympic theme song blared through an estimated 1 billion homes during the opening ceremonies of the XXIX Olympiad this past weekend; that’s nearly 15% of the world.

Omega Olympics Some of the world’s biggest companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Omega Watches, Kodak, Visa, and NBC Universal are sponsoring this monumental event.

With Pay-Per-Click advertising, it’s easy to become part of the ‘team.’ PPC provides the advantage of distributing a controlled message in a timely manner. Utilizing PPC, advertisers can promote time sensitive specials or push unique aspects of their business at different times of the year, or decade for that matter.

Let’s use Omega Watches as an example. Omega has been the Olympics’ ‘Official Timekeeper’ for 23 Olympic Games, the first being 1932’s Los Angeles games.

All weekend I had on NBC in the background and noticed a myriad of Omega commercials and logos, which seemed to be plastered all over Beijing. One of my clients happens to sell Omega watches, and in order to become part of the ‘team’ I created at least one ad in every ad group that mentions Omega being the official timekeeper of the Olympic Games.

Taking advantage of Omega’s increased brand awareness campaign during this time will only benefit my own client’s Omega campaign.

Use this time (it all ends the 24th) to see how online consumers will search differently and, more importantly, for what products.

Go world!

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Jul
28th

Jumping on the Olympic Adwagon

Posted by Lawrence on July 28, 2008 at 11:16 am

It seems that everyone, including the media, advertisers and athletes, are jumping on the Olympic adwagon for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China. The internet has become a vital information channel for audiences watching the Olympic Games, and the ad world is utilizing the latest high-speed video streaming and social media technologies to capture the attention of the Olympics’ global audience.

With a population of 1.3 billion people, China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest internet population. According to an article in China Daily, it is estimated that Chinese internet users are spending about 570 million hours online per day. Within the next decade, China’s online advertising market is expected to increase to 85 billion yuan (approximately 12.4 billion U.S. dollars) from its current 9.34 billion yuan (approximately 1.3 billion dollars).

To reach this growing number of Chinese internet users, as well as the rest of the online world, many companies are using the Olympic Games in Beijing as a springboard.

Image:striatic

Coca-Cola is pushing the social media aspect with new software that allows people to pass “virtual Olympic torches” through instant messaging. So far, 58 million people have received the virtual torches. Coca-Cola also started a “Design the World a Coke” campaign, which allows users to create a custom Coke bottle design and then tallies the number of bottles created by country. Overall, Coca-Cola is spending an estimated $75 – $90 million in multimedia advertising to further build its brand in China, which is already Coke’s fourth largest market. China is expected to surpass the United States as the beverage company’s top market.

Another company that is getting involved with the online social aspect of the Olympics is Lenovo. The technology company has created blogs for 100 athletes and has given these athletes laptops and video cameras to chronicle their preparation for the games. Lenovo isn’t hosting the blogs on its own site, but is showcasing the blogs. In return, Lenovo only asks that the participating athletes display a “Lenovo Olympic Games Blogger” badge on their blogs.

McDonald’s has also expanded on its traditional Olympics advertising with a social strategy. The fast food company is offering an alternate-reality game called The Lost Ring, which is currently boasting more than 2 million players from 100 countries. The Lost Ring game challenges players to solve mysteries surrounding the Olympics.

Sohu.com Inc. is the internet content services sponsor of the Beijing Games and has reportedly paid $20 million for rights to host the Official Website of the Beijing Olympic Games, in addition to use of its logo. As the only website sponsor of the Olympics, Sohu.com plans to send a reporting team of more than 700 journalists to the Olympics.

Meanwhile stateside, NBC Universal has plans to sell $1 billion in commercial air time during the Beijing Olympics. According to Reuters, NBC has already sold more than $900 million in ad time for the upcoming Olympic Games by booking nearly 90% of its inventory three weeks ahead of the opening ceremony.

NBC Universal plans to air a record 3,600 hours of Olympics coverage between August 8 and August 24 across its broadcast, cable TV and online outlets. 2,200 of those hours are expected to be streamed live over the internet via NBCOlympics.com.

To track its Olympics audience across a variety of platforms, NBC is utilizing TAMI (Total Audience Measurement Index), which combines data from Nielsen Media Research, Omniture and Rentrak. With more precise audience measurements, NBC can prove the worth of its cross-platform reach and likely influence commercial sales for the 2012 games.

Whether you plan to watch the live feeds of the Olympic events, tune in for highlights and statistics, or just check out the latest advertisements, the online technologies in place for the 2008 Beijing Olympics are truly a union of people and ideas on a global scale.

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