Winter Olympics Advertising and Social Media Monitoring

How to Train Your Dragon

My favorite commercials from the Winter Olympics were for the film, How to Train Your Dragon, and for Jay Leno’s return to The Tonight Show. Watch the animated vignettes for How to Train Your Dragon, specially created for the Olympics and showing the “Viking origins” of several Winter Olympics events, here. Watch The Tonight Show commercial here.

I was impressed by DreamWorks’ effort to create humorous vignettes just for the Olympics, and I think The Tonight Show commercial was a quick, humorous way to promote Jay Leno’s return, playing on Jay Leno’s car collection.

Although I haven’t found advertising pricing information for the 2010 games, this news release from January 2010 indicates that the average price of a 30-second commercial for the 2006 Winter Olympics was $224,600. For at least that amount this year, advertisers must be keen to get as much feedback as possible on their impact. Nielsen Ratings showing the number of viewers of the Winter Olympics were great, but what about consumer sentiment?

Social media monitoring SaaS products such as Attensity360 provide a solution for evaluating the buzz about any topic, not just among journalists, but including any social media activity among the consumers that you are trying to reach. Social media monitoring also helps you directly interact with your audience. You can view their comments, answer questions, thank them for good feedback, resolve an issue, or survey and evaluate a dragon of negative feedback and decide if and how you want to respond.

Attensity360 dashboard showing topic track and awareness reports for How to Train Your Dragon

I created two dashboards in Attensity360 that monitor social-media activity for How to Train Your Dragon and The Tonight Show in the last 30 days. How to Train Your Dragon was mentioned 3,879 times in social media outlets. The topic track and other reports include comments in addition to original posts. Its high point before the Olympics was 93 mentions on one day; during the Olympics, its coverage steadily climbed, reaching a peak of 231 mentions on one day. Following the Olympics, coverage remained steadily over 100 mentions per day. Sentiment was 59.4 percent positive; 35.4 percent neutral; 2.7 percent negative; and 2.4 percent mixed. I can see all outlets where it was mentioned, the measure of sentiment for each outlet, the number of mentions per day, and I can even drill down to each individual mention.

Attensity360 dashboard showing The Tonight Show trend and sentiment reports

The Tonight Show was mentioned 19,596 times in social media outlets over the last 30 days. Coverage rose from a low point of 245 mentions on one day before the Olympics to 1,035 mentions on one day during the Olympics to 3,289 mentions on March 2, the day after Jay Leno returned to the show. Sentiment was 57.4 percent positive; 25.1 percent neutral; 11.7 percent negative; and 5.8 percent mixed. The top outlet was Digg, with 712 items. Here’s an article in The Hollywood Reporter that I found through the Attensity360 reports, when I dug down through the mentions that Attensity360 found on Digg. I could have found the same article from a web search, but Attensity360 adds tremendous value because it aggregates all mentions, including comments, and then analyzes awareness, trend, sentiment, velocity, top sources, top authors, and content distribution by type (blogs, discussion forums, and micro blogs).

Attensity360 shows that both How to Train Your Dragon and The Tonight Show are doing well in social media outlets. How to Train Your Dragon will likely receive many more mentions after it is released on March 26th, just like The Tonight Show did after Jay Leno’s return.

Wouldn’t it be great to have similar insights for your company, products, or executives?