The Mobile Olympics

Stephen Dunford, CEO of mobile idle screen marketing company Celltick, considers the impact of mobile marketing at the Beijing Olympics.

The numbers say it all: the Beijing Olympics are looking like the most heavily-branded event the world has ever seen. Between 8 and 24 August, the world is tuning into Beijing. An estimated 8 million consumers will pass through the city to see the sporting pinnacle and immense cultural show that the Olympics have now become. With each Olympic Games host country striving to outdo the last, nobody is quite sure what to expect, but they are sure to see a spectacle never seen before.
Advertising at the Olympics will be overcrowded, to say the least. There are over 60 official Olympics sponsors targeting the 8 million visitors that the city is expecting while the Games are taking place. The anticipated global audience of 4 billion will be tuning into digital media coverage via TV, web and mobile before, during and after the event, in addition to experiencing brand outreach through official merchandising.

Lost in the noise
For brands, getting through to the consumer will not be an easy task. Consumers will be exposed to an average of around 3,000 adverts a day during the Games and advertisers face a very real need to differentiate in the way they get through to the consumer. If not, they will find their messages become lost in the rest of the noise around the event. For an elite sponsor, paying around 100 million for the exposure, this is not a risk they can afford to take.
With this level of advertising noise in such a large forum, premium brands and local businesses alike must find a unique way to engage with the distracted consumer and capture their attention. To the consumer, one billboard can look much like another. Print advertising can get lost around Olympic news; online banners are already subject to ad-blindness; TV commercials might be the ideal time to grab a snack from the refrigerator so as not to miss a moment of Olympic history. To raise the impact of their ad spending, advertisers need to enrich their core advertising mix with a more targeted, relevant and personal media channel that can identify and speak to a specific target audience; namely, the mobile phone.
The mobile phone is an ideal medium to create this kind of personal communication, particularly when advertising can be targeted to individual consumers based on a combination of location specific and time based profiling, in conjunction with user preference and demographic data. Advertising is most powerful and effective when speaking directly with consumers based on who, what, where and when, not just at the Olympics.

Idle screen marketing
To capitalise on this opportunity, some brands are now giving consumers the choice to receive advertising messages on the idle screen of their mobile phones, in combination with meaningful and relevant content. The idle screen is an interface that has historically been under-utilised as a marketing mechanism, but is now beginning to emerge as a valid part of the marketers portfolio. Without intruding on the functionality of the mobile phone, idle screen marketing can deliver messages to consumers in the one place they are most likely to check several times a day.
This non-intrusive methodology generates its best results when consumers are tightly segmented, getting down to core attributes which define their likelihood to engage with the brand, including  their location, the time of day and their interest in the product category. By doing so, brands can create and target a defined, interested group of consumers, build a two-way relationship with attention-grabbing innovative content, and ultimately, trigger a significant increase in response rates.
The Olympic Games will be the most heavily branded event the world has ever seen. It is no longer enough for brands to channel their resources solely towards traditional advertising channels,  and those who choose to do so will only fail to achieve cut-through in a crowded and competitive marketplace. The future for big brands is to spread their advertising budgets across more and more well-chosen channels in order to maximise their impact on consumers, and the Olympics will demonstrate clearly who is embracing the future and who is being left behind.