Beijing Olympics paves the way for future mobile marketing

Here’s a funny entry to highlight the difference between marketing a mere 8 years ago and today. Marketing around the Olympic Games used to be a like a 100m cakewalk. You pay a gazillion dollars to the Olympic Committee and then another gazillion to show off your products on television and print.
Of course, that was only the Coca Cola’s of this world who managed to do it, while the rest of the smaller business world were left salivating like Pavlov’s dog. Eight years on and Beijing 2008 rolls by and we can already see the effect mobile communication has.
Even Coca Cola realized this and were one of the many companies to introduce mobile advertising and marketing to create awareness of their product around the Games. Their method: A simple Bluetooth connection in thousands of locations in around the Olympic stadium, focusing on the youth market and delivering video commercials directly to Bluetooth enabled handsets.
NBC who were gifted the sole rights to broadcast the Olympics in the US have pretty much covered all bases of mobile communications. “Consumers”, as we marketers tend to call normal people, have an array of mobile alerts programmes to choose from. Among these are daily news alerts, real-time information, and breaking news, to athlete alerts, medal results, event reminders, video highlights and a photo of the day- categorized by sports category. This is profound and guaranteed to drive advertising revenue through the roof.
The fact is people, a mere 8 million consumers will pass through Beijing alone during the Olympic Games and it is estimated that each person would be confronted with about 3000 advertising exposures per day! This is not even mentioning the television and radio commercials. This leaves mobile marketing, a channel that is purely permission based, for companies to secure loyalty and dedicated brand exposures to their consumers.
There’s certain opportunities that come along every once in a while that positions businesses to maximize their advertising spend and show greater return on brand exposure and consumer loyalty. The FIFA Soccer World Cup hosted by South Africa in 2010 and the London Games in 2012 among the obvious.
Where previously, smaller businesses where left out in the cold due to the extreme nature of advertising price hikes, most of them could simply stand on the side and watch in vain. Today however, a combination of the internet and mobile communications has opened a world of opportunities for these companies to engage with their target markets without employing bank breaking budgets to do so.
Digital marketing has leveled the playing ground, resulting in a more competitive market where the smartest and often the simplest from of marketing would succeed. Gone are the days when your marketing budget determined your success.
This should be an eye opener to businesses all over. What they do with this information will determine their fate.

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