Brands that advertised during Friday’s opening ceremonies for the Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, were apparently hot search topics while the ceremonies were taking place.
NBC commissioned Google to perform research on searches during the games’ opening ceremonies. The search giant tracked queries following a song performed for Haiti, and found a 10-fold increase for queries containing the keyword “Haiti”, or the song that was performed (“We Are The World”). Searches for these keywords tapered off thereafter to just double what they normally would have been.
In addition, separate research from Neilsen IAG confirmed the data, showing that there were significant increases in brand and message recall for brands that advertised during the broadcast.
The opening ceremonies reportedly drew a historically-large television audience: an average of 32.6 million viewers from 7pm to 11pm, according to Nielsen, the largest audience ever for a non-US Olympic opening ceremonies. Since then, the Olympic television coverage has garnered an average of 28.6 million viewers in prime time.
More data from Nielsen AIG showed that ads for cars shown during the opening ceremonies produced a brand recall of 41 percent higher than prime time average.
NBC’s president of research, Alan Wurtzel, said that the results were helpful in being “able to demonstrate that there is a very significant relationship between exposure [on TV] and [resulting viewer] behavior.” Indeed, for anyone who’s ever doubted a correlation between television ads and online searches, the research is pretty convincing evidence to the contrary. It’s news that could see many online-only advertisers rethinking their brand strategy.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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Tags: google olympics, nbc, olympic searches, Winter Olympics 2010
