Analysis: Beijing wins gold with digital coverage

Marketers and media owners also learned from the Games. UK TV advertising cut-through was limited by the fact that the main terrestrial broadcaster was the ad-free BBC, while Eurosport, the other licensed UK broadcaster, was available only to subscribers.Eurosport responded by teaming up with Yahoo! to create a simultaneous digital presence that reached wider numbers and complemented TV coverage.

With track-side ads prohibited during the Games, many bigger Olympic sponsors, including McDonald's, Visa and Samsung, had to find more enterprising ways to engage audiences. Add in faster broadband speeds, a wider range of online applications and an unusually large Olympic appetite thanks to the pending London 2012, and suddenly digital was the media of the moment.

Brands responded by investing more in digital marketing. The likes of Nike, CNBC, Speedo and McDonald's assigned large proportions of marketing budgets to digital, having spent little or nothing during the 2004 Olympics. McDonald's launched The Lost Ring, a minimally branded alternate reality game; Nike created Nikelab, a digital showcase of 100 apparel and footwear products worn by athletes; and Speedo hosted its own site advertising sportswear worn by athletes during the Games and their more casual apparel afterwards.

"We wanted bang for buck when Olympic awareness was at its highest," explains Lisa McSorley, Speedo's chief digital officer. "Digital media offers great flexibility, enabling us to reach out to global audiences in seconds."

Media owners have been quick to respond to marketers' demands. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) widened its audiences by partnering YouTube to provide streamed footage of the competition for countries without video-on-demand, including India, Republic of Korea and Iraq. Ads were limited only to Olympic sponsors, but YouTube believes this is the start of an IOC partnership programme that could attract more sponsorship opportunities next time.

Many major media owners experimented with digital technology to explore potential revenue-generating opportunities that could be initiated at the next global sporting event. BBC.com created a unique Olympics widget to provide tailored content direct to viewers' desktops. Though developed too close to the Games for sponsorship deals to be set up, the broadcaster hopes this will be a draw for advertisers at future events like the 2010 World Cup.

AOL created a branded Olympics site. "We've noticed a 30 per cent uplift in page views and ad impressions since the start of the Olympics," observes Nina Vanneck, AOL Europe's director of sport. "The idea is to capture interest in a global sporting event and create content that matches advertisers with their audience, environment and response needs."

Earlier this year, US broadcaster NBC teamed up with MSN to launch NBCOlympics.com, allowing brand-owners to run pre-roll ads around 2,200 hours of live events. The channel brokered integrated packages that fed into its TV and digital ad revenue, attracting a number of brands, including Coca-Cola (see box, below), ExxonMobil and McDonald's. By August 11, it had already generated more than $1 billion (£530 million) in revenues, even though 15 per cent of its Olympic slots remained unsold a month before the Games.

In the UK, Eurosport aimed to widen its audience share via a partnership with Yahoo! to create pan-European sites with selected video highlights packages edited and distributed by the sports provider. The results mean that advertisers can now target sports fans region by region across both the internet and TV.

Ultimately, this is still a work in progress, but the digital sceptics of Athens 2004 may just be forced to concede defeat.

Coca-Cola goes digital to beef up its TV advertising presence

Global Olympic partner Coca-Cola bolstered its TV ad presence by sponsoring sections on the NBCOlympics.com site. On the main page, the brand hosted 'Quick Picks', an interactive digital card game where players could compete to win prizes, and 'Team USA', dedicated to video-streamed content documenting the fortunes of US athletes. The bulk of Coke's activity on NBCOlympics was dedicated to the Coca-Cola Global Village, a microsite informing users of individual athletes and top performances each day using videos, briefs and news reports.The link with NBC was part of Coke's wider digital presence during the Games. It included the WE8 programme, collaboration between eight of China's most visual artists and musicians. The site featured eight downloadable music tracks and bottle designs based on the idea 'One whole world on the Coke Side of Life'. It was supported by another microsite, Design the World a Coke. Users created online artwork for the Coca-Cola contour bottle.