Lessons for Madison Avenue From \'Real-Time\' Olympics

Julio Cortez/Associated Press Cullen Jones, Olympics medal in tow, appeared this month at the New York Jets-Houston Texans game.

The World Series is about to begin, but for the experts at the Nielsen Sports Forum Tuesday morning the focus was on the Summer Games in London and the lessons for marketers who sponsor live sports events.

The panel, which took place in Manhattan, even included a gold-medal-winning American Olympic athlete, the swimmer Cullen Jones, who in keeping with the subject matter talked about how he tends to his brand. Responding to a joke about how obligatory it is for Olympians to give audiences a glim pse of their gold medals, Mr. Jones did just that as the panel began.

(Another panelist was also an Olympian: Tommy O'Hare, a speed skater and member of the United States team at the 1998 Winter Games. Mr. O'Hare is now manager for sports content partnerships at the YouTube division of Google.)

The Nielsen event is not the first attempt to share with Madison Avenue lessons learned from the Summer Games.

For instance, last month NBCUniversal, the Comcast division that owns the American rights to the Olympics through 2020, presented results of a dozen studies about how viewers' behavior this summer differed from how they responded to the Winter Olympics in 2010 and the Summer Olympics in 2008.

A central topic of the panel, as it was for the NBCUniversal studies, was the so-called second screen behavior of Olympic TV viewers, who used devices like smartphones and tablets to read articles online, chat with friends and check their social media accounts.

The ability to communicate in real time while in London with people on Twitter “was absolutely amazing,” Mr. Jones said, adding that he “felt I was closer to my fans” than when he engaged with them on Facebook during the Summer Games in Beijing four years ago.

His followers on Twitter increased to more than 50,000 during the London Olympics, Mr. Jones said, compared with “not even 10,000” before. (His handle on Twitter is @CullenJones.)

“If I tweeted one thing, I would get at least 100 responses,” he added. “They were able to live through my journey.”

He added that “as an athlete, I need to be as active as possible” on social media to keep fans interested, particularly during “the next four years” as he prepares to compete in the 2016 Summer Olympics.

But he also offered some cautionary words. “Whatever you do, don't tweet the first thing that comes into your mind,” he said, adding that because he considers himself a brand, such candor may sully his image and not “look right for the sponsors,” which in his case include Citigroup, Deloitte and Nike.

Another panel member, Lisa Baird, chief marketing officer at the United States Olympic Committee, cautioned marketers who sign athletes as endorsers.

“At some point you have to remember” that the athletes “are training and competing,” Ms. Baird said, and give them a chance “to go back into the pool” rather than take part in another marketing-related activity.

Ms. Baird said that since the end of the cold-war-era rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States committee has found that focusing on the biographies and personalities of the members of Team U.S.A. was the best way to stimulate public interest in the Summer and Winter Games.

For instance, teenage girls and boys “are captured by the stories of the athletes,” Ms. Baird said, because th ey themselves often play sports and can relate to the Olympians.

In live online chats with American Olympic swimmers like Mr. Jones during the London Games, she added, “swimmers who are 15 and 16” would ask for more information about training routines and recovering from injuries.

Another panelist, Niel Sandfort, director for marketing at Chobani, the Greek-yogurt maker that is a Team U.S.A. sponsor, discussed his company's experience with what Ms. Baird called the “real-time, multiplatform content machines” that marketers manage during events like the Olympics.

Chobani has decided to concentrate its efforts in social media on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube, Mr. Sandfort said, to avoid trying to do too much at once. “We've never done any sports marketing before,” he added, “and then we spent all our money on the Olympics.”

Chobani wanted to become a sponsor of Team U.S.A. and run commercials during the coverage of the Summer Games to build awareness, Mr. Sandfort said, knowing full well that “75 percent” of people watching NBC, YouTube and other channels “would say, ‘Who the heck is Chobani?'”

But the gamble paid off, he added, as “shelves got wiped out” in stores, “sales went way up” and the Chobani yogurt plant was “maxed out.”

“We had to cut certain flavors,” Mr. Sandfort said, “which upset the lemon fans out there.”

Among the Chobani marketing efforts was a takeover of the youtube.com home page on July 28, he added, and the commercial that appeared there performed “phenomenally for us.”

Mr. O'Hare used the same word, “phenomenally,” to describe YouTube's overall results during the Summer Games compared with its forecasts.

A YouTube channel devoted to the International Olympic Committee “still gets a lot of viewers,” he added.

Stuart Elliott has been the advertising columnist at The New York T imes since 1991. Follow @stuartenyt on Twitter and sign up for In Advertising, his weekly e-mail newsletter.