Vancouver Olympics Coverage Is Stimulating Millions of Conversations About Advertisers' Brands - Ed Keller - MediaBizBloggers

What a month it's been for televised sport spectaculars. First, the Super Bowl broke the record for the largest television audience ever. And now, the Winter Olympics are proving to be a ratings bonanza as well, helping to knock American Idol off its ratings perch for the first time since 2004.

Beyond the game itself, the Super Bowl brings with it an annual flurry of water cooler discussion and professional reviews of the advertising winners and losers. Which ads were funny, which were not; which generated online (and offline) chatter; which were the most viewed (and viewed again) on YouTube.

While there is not the same "sport" associated with dissecting and debating the quality and creative appeal of Olympics advertising, the opportunity for marketers to reach a large audience and stimulate a ripple effect for their brands via word of mouth is substantial. This is important for advertisers, because research has shown that advertising drives a substantial volume of word of mouth, and that ad-influenced WOM brings with it more enthusiastic recommendations. When a word of mouth conversation includes references to advertising, it is 20% more likely than other conversations to include an active recommendation to buy or try the brand being discussed. Thus advertising both stimulates word of mouth, and also helps to encourage brand advocacy.

I have written before in this column about the power of sports fans, across multiple sports, to spark conversations with other people about brands and influence their decisions regarding those brands. In particular, we have seen in the past that Winter Olympics fans are also nearly two times more likely than the average American to be consumer influencers in nearly every major advertising category.

It is for this reason we were honored when NBC Universal announced that Keller Fay would be part of its "billion dollar research lab" – with a charge to measure the word of mouth impact (offline as well as online) of Olympics advertising.

Results from the early part of the Games, just released, find that less than halfway through the 17 days of Vancouver, the results are already exceeding our expectations, with many more days remaining to build word of mouth momentum.

More specifically, our research found that five days into the Olympics, an average of 3 million more people are talking about each advertiser, compared to a benchmark set during the six weeks prior to the start of the Games. The study was based on a total of 4,211 online interviews with consumers 18 to 54 years of age, including a wave of 1,277 interviews conducted between the Opening Ceremony on February 12 and midnight on Feb. 17. The study utilizes Keller Fay's ongoing TalkTrack® system for measuring all forms of word of mouth, including online, face-to-face, and over the phone conversations.

The study also finds:

Two-thirds (65%) of conversations about advertiser brands were positive compared to only 6% negative, a ratio of 11-1 positive to negative, which compares favorably to the norm of 7-1 in other studies by Keller Fay.

Compared to the pre-Olympics benchmark, advertiser WOM levels were 41% higher, on average, for TV viewers of the Olympics, and 84% higher for people following the Olympics on television and the Internet and/or mobile device. People who are spending 3+ hours following the Olympics each day were 63% more likely to talk about the advertisers compared to the benchmark.

As the Olympics story continues to unfold, there is much more to study and learn: What is the cumulative impact of Olympics advertising on word of mouth and does it build over the course of the Games? What is the impact of cross media exposure? What are the drivers of WOM lifts for Olympic advertisers – including spending levels, creative content, and other relevant variables?

Armed with this information from this large "research lab" that will be shared over time by NBC Universal, advertisers will be able to learn about the "social value" of advertising, in support of more engaging marketing and advertising for their brands. It will also provide advertisers with important new insights into how traditional and emerging "social media" can work together effectively.

Stay tuned.

Ed Keller, CEO of the Keller Fay Group, has been called "one of the most recognized names in word of mouth." The publication of Keller's book,The Influentials, has been called the "seminal moment in the development of word of mouth." Ed can be contacted at ekeller@kellerfay.com.

Read all Ed’s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Ed Keller - MediaBizBloggers.

Follow our Twitter updates @MediaBizBlogger