Acer's Olympic pavillion

Challenge

The London Olympic Games was the second Olympic event at which Acer held the title of ‘Official Hardware Partner’ – having previously sponsored the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver.

In order to create an on-site brand experience like no other, Acer appointed total brand activation agency, Pico, to build a Showcase Pavilion within the Olympic Park. Pico in return appointed specialist experiential staffing agency Blackjack to select and train the Showcase Team to engage and host the site.

Situated close to the Athletes Village, Acer were able to exhibit and demonstrate their new products, latest technologies and innovations to the public inside the Showcase Pavilion, whilst simultaneously providing a corporate hospitality suite for VIP guests to soak up the incredible atmosphere of London 2012.

The Showcase consisted of three levels where guests would be immersed in an interactive experience combining projection, lights and imagery to create an unforgettable journey; the top floor included an exclusive VIP area for IOC members and athletes to use with spectacular views of the Olympic Park which included an unparalleled view of the Olympic Stadium.

Insight

There were two key objectives attached to Acer’s on-site Olympic activity.  First and foremost it wanted to attract visitors to the Olympic Park into the Pavilion to experience the Acer Journey through customer facing interaction. Once inside, the aim was to educate visitors on Acer products, new technologies and innovations to enhance brand knowledge and awareness.

Solution

An entirely unique experiential concept was created, to immerse the visitor in an unrivalled and entirely personalised brand experience. Blackjack provided event managers and brand ambassadors, all of whom had been approved by LOCOG (London 2012 Governing Body) and accredited for the Olympic Park beforehand.

Blackjack staff then guided visitors through an interactive journey that began outside the showcase in the Olympics Park. Visitors were issued with an interactive journey smartcard. Each card had a QR driver that, when swiped onto a QR reader positioned next to the various features on various levels, would allow each visitor a personal and individual interaction complete with info/avatar capture of themselves. The smartcard allowed QR activation at each feature display within the pavilion via a unique visitor QR code which isolated each individual visitor’s interaction through the various feature displays within the showcase, via a microsite: acerjourney.com

Once inside the Pavilion, visitors had 8 stations to experience:

• Journey Sphere - Visitors could browse and explore through a variety of games and videos

• “Fast Faster Fastest” Arena – An interactive challenge navigating a route through a computer circuit board in the fastest time

• Infinity Gateway – A room which projected multiple images of the visitor on 3 different graphic backgrounds

• Predator Gaming Area – Visitors could play the official London 2012 video game

• Devices on Level 2 – A platform showcasing the very best of the Acer product portfolio

• Devices on Level 1 – A platform showcasing the very best professional market devices
from Acer
• Theatre – A unique mixed reality theatre show featuring AR and interactive images

• Avatar – The chance for visitors to create a personalised avatar in the Pavilion and share it on acer.com

VIP guests also had use of the third level hospitality and viewing platform.

Results

In terms of meeting the first two objectives, the Acer Pavilion had 63,846 visitors during the Olympic and Paralympic periods, in which 40,222 registered to become a part of the Acer Journey, this can be measured as 63% of all people who visited the Pavilion registering.

This was an average of 2,500 visitors every day to the Pavilion during the course of the Olympics and Paralympics.

Due to a high number of visitors being children, some parents did not feel it appropriate for their children to fill out their personal details, therefore decreasing the percentage of visitors registering to become a part of the Acer Journey.

By Cream Editorial

Last year in September, Irish bookmaker and betting services brand Paddy Power took ambush marketing to new heights, quite literally! And here’s the story behind the story.

 The brand used skywriting as a tool to post tweets high up in the sky in Chicago just above the Medinah County Club at the time of the Ryder Cup tournament. The aim? To motivate Europeans to cheer for their team. The cheeky brand did so by fuelling the US-Europe tussle at the golf matches through sky tweets cheering European players, and taking none-too-subtle jibes at American golfers.

As someone who has fallen foul of the draconian Olympic branding laws that prevent you from mentioning practically anything to do with the Olympics unless you work for VISA or Coca-Cola, I found this slap in the face for the IOC particularly entertaining. 

For those of you that haven't heard, the Olympic branding guidlines handbook contains two lists: 'A' and 'B'. List A contains words like 'London', '2012', 'Twenty Twelve', 'Olympics', while List B has words like 'medals', 'gold', 'silver' and so on. The guidelines make the peculiar ruling that using one word from List A together with one or more words from List B probably means that you're infringing the Olympic brand if you use it for commercial purposes. 

The same guidlines go on to intimate that even if you avoid all the words in List A or B, you could still be doing something wrong. 

Maybe this act of brandalism was sponsored by Dr Dre...?

By Cream Editorial

Brands are spending a lot of money on advertising and social media throughout the Olympics, and with good reason. The shift in the way that people use social media since the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing has been monumental. Social media has become a part of everyday life for many people so it makes sense for brands to use it to their advantage.

Over the past four years the number of social media users has dramatically increased, Facebook has gone from 100mto almost 1bn users, and Twitter registrations have shot from 6m to 500m.

The number of people using social media isn’t the only thing that’s changed, coverage of the games itself and the way people want to view events like the Olympics has undergone a significant shift. This infographic from The Wall (below) is a great illustration of how social media has overtaken print and television as the most popular way to keep afloat of the games.

Twitter has become an integral part of the Olympics coverage. The BBC has shown athlete’s tweets across its broadcasts and on the BBC’s Olympic homepage. This demonstrates how important Twitter has become, in the UK it has become completely normal to see Twitter feeds on websites or television programmes or to be given a hashtag to use while watching TV.

The Olympics Hub provides an easy way to follow your favourite athletes and the games in general.  The hub allows users to sign up via Facebook or Twitter and shows visitors the top followed athletes for featured athletes for each day. The search facility filters queries by athlete, event, sport or discipline ensuring users find exactly what they’re after.

The official Olympic sponsors have been making the most of these changes and it seems to be paying off.

McDonalds is the most associated brand with the games. In the run up to the Olympics from January to July McDonalds was mentioned 90,911 times in conversations about the Olympics.

Samsung, with the help of Olympic Ambassador David Beckham, has also generated over 1,000 tweets about David Beckham and 22,519 general tweets and 15,210 blog posts mentioned the brand in association with the Olympics.

Coca-Cola has also been pulling out all the stops with its advertising in the months leading up to the games. Having been associated with the Olympics for 83 years Coca-Cola has launched its biggest ever Olympics advertising campaign for 2012. ‘Move to the Beat’ enlisted the help of Mark Ronson to create an original track for the campaign and he produced ‘Anywhere in the World’, sung by Katy B, to represent the individuals and sports involved in the Olympics. This campaign helped to ensure that Coca-Cola was one of the most recognised brands associated with the Olympics, 60,271 Twitter users also shared the image of the Olympic inspired Coca-Cola cans. 

Infographic via The Wall.

Can't get enough of the Olympics? Check out Cream's database of sports related case studies here.

By Giles Ivey

"The excitement is growing so much I think the Geirger counter of Olympo-mania is going to go 'zoink' off the scale" - London Mayor Boris Johnson

The 2012 Olympics are here - and by the time you read this, it should be fairly obvious who many of the winners are. For the athletes, it will come down to going for gold. For brand sponsors, success will be measured in reach and recall metrics. And for the International Olympic Committee success is having as few embarrassing glitches go public as possible.

But there are plenty of losers this year too – and we're not talking about the human rights case of everyone at the Olympic Park having to drink Coke instead of Pepsi. We are witnessing a collective and massive missed opportunity in advertising this year as nothing about the games is left to chance.

By giving some brands a temporary monopoly, Olympic organisers have killed the Darwinian energy that compels advertisers to outdo their competitors, because there are none. And no competitors means no reactive strategies, no guerrilla tactics, and worst of all, no creative spontaneity. Every sponsor at the Olympics is guaranteed success metrics, but they're robbing themselves of those "YES!" moments that galvanise the next steps of creative thinking.

Read the full article: "The Olympics are killing advertiser's creativity" on the SAY Daily blog. 

By Ruben Pillai

Although there’s just three weeks to go, there are still key opportunities still exist to get your brand associated with Euro 2012, without even leaving the UK.

With all the buzz around the London 2012 Olympics, it almost feels as if brands have forgotten about the excellent promotional opportunities that Europe’s biggest football tournament, Euro 2012, has to offer.

By Ruben Pillai

Although there’s just three weeks to go, there are still key opportunities still exist to get your brand associated with Euro 2012, without even leaving the UK.

With all the buzz around the London 2012 Olympics, it almost feels as if brands have forgotten about the excellent promotional opportunities that Europe’s biggest football tournament, Euro 2012, has to offer.

The event may not be being held on home soil, unlike the Olympics, but in some respects that enables brands to create their own local experiences around key individual games and generate a tournament atmosphere that makes people feel like they are there.

But first, why Euro 2012? Well it has it’s own distinct place on the calendar, positioned between the Queen’s Jubilee and the Olympics, delivers a specific audience (particularly young men and women, non-luxury), and more of an opportunity to create an interactive, sharing experience due to the nature of a football match.

With only three weeks to go before the tournament kicks off, is it too late to plan related activity? Not necessarily. You may have missed the boat with respect to the main official sponsorship opportunities in and around the stadiums themselves, and with respect to securing TV ad space. There are probably also limited options relating to taking groups to the tournament or organising satellite events in the Ukraine or Poland. However, if you get a move on there are still chances to tap into Euro fever both online and live – or even better, a combination of the two.

For example, you could emulate the gamification trend and create your own branded Euro fantasy football experience that your customers will be able to play online during the tournament, with your brand front of mind as they do so. You can use email marketing, any existing social media activity, along with traditional media, such as newspapers, to promote the game and encourage people to sign up, while offering a series of prizes for the winners. Although developing such an online game from scratch can take some time, there are likely to be a number of ‘brand-able’ off-the-shelf packages available that can be up and running quickly.

However, if a brand came to me right now and asked how best they could leverage the buzz around Euro 2012, I’d have to say that creating a series of boutique events coinciding with key games would be the way forward. The number and scale would depend on budget, but each would feature a big screen showing a specific game, a bar and food, plus entertaining activities such as a live penalty shoot-out, band and party afterwards.

You could invite specific customers if you have a relatively small number of high-value. Alternatively you could run a competition or promotion online to select the audiences. Furthermore, to maximise the return you can amplify and extend the reach of the activity by videoing the events and either streaming them live online and/or uploading an edited version afterwards, drawing further attention to the content through social media.

You could even include a special booth at each event where revellers could pop in and record their reactions live. This can create a wonderful snapshot of the enjoyment levels within the audience and reflect really positively on the brand through a video compilation of the best responses, which can be hosted online.

Using live and online activity in this way not only builds loyalty through giving a memorable experience to customers, but also allows you to broadcast the fact you’ve done this, heightening positive associations with your brand.

Such experiential activity can also incorporate employees, boosting motivation levels and creating stronger brand ambassadors.

Tournaments like the Euros that lend themselves to this kind of communal celebration around a number of specific events don’t come round too often. And local satellite events can tap into the atmosphere and create an ‘as if I was there’ experience, while offering unlimited branding opportunities without the strictures that sponsoring the actual tournament can bring.

Ruben Pillai is Olympics Co-ordinator at Blackjack Promotions

The UK media has been dominated by news of a TV commercial sponsored by the government of Argentina that sees members of the Argentine Olympic team training on the Falklands.

"To compete on English soil, we train on Argentine soil."

For readers outside the UK, many of whom will have little idea where the Falkland Islands are, or the sensitivities that surround the governance of the Islands. The spot, which was apprently filmed in secret, sees an Argentinian athlete running past various landmarks in the capital city Port Stanley. One particular sequence that has caused particular ire is a scene that shows one athlete performing step-ups on a memorial for British servicemen who died in the 1981 conflict.

The spot, filmed by Y&R, has even come under fire from WPP Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell, who has been quoted as being "appalled and embarassed."

Some commentators have written off the film as a desperate attempt to stir-up a patriotic by President Kirchner using the highly visible platform of the Olympics. Despite the many laws and statute that exist to protect the sporting purity of the games, there are always some adverts that cause trouble...

Spain upsets the Chinese

Ads for the 2008 Beijing games appeared in a Spanish sporting newspaper depicted the national basketball team posing in their official kit, pulling 'slanty eye' faces to the camera. The IOC were not impressed.

Nike upsets the athletes

Atlanta, 1996, and Nike puts a foot in it with a billboard that bears the slogan: "You don't win silver, you lose gold," which attracted complaints from bronze and silver medal winners from previous games. 

Nike upsets the children

The 2000 Olympics in Sydney saw U.S Olympic runner Suzy Favor Hamilton appear in a controversial TV spot for Nike that saw her tackle a chainsaw-wielding maniac in slasher-movie style. The ad's punchline, "why sport? You'll live longer" failed to turn the scary ad into the joke in which it was intended. 

Reebok doesn't upset anyone, but backs the wrong man

Reebok spent millions on an ad campaign (Dan & Dave) that championed the athletes Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson ahead of the 1992 Barcelona games. The two American decathletes were expected to perform well but O’Brien, who held a world record in the sport, failed spectacularly when he was unable to clear the pole vault. He scored zero points for the event and failed to qualify for Barcelona.