News Monitoring: Important and Illuminating, but What’s Next?
Photo courtesy of LaLunaBlanca
Since the Olympics kicked off on July 27th, we have been using Newsdesk to track the news coverage of the Big 11 corporate sponsors to see who is getting the most coverage for their money. Today we discuss “News Monitoring: Important and Illuminating, but What’s Next?”.
Monitoring media coverage volume, market, source, etc… is part of a larger process of determining the value of marketing campaigns. More coverage can be great, but does it contribute to the bottom line?
The Motley Fool weighs in with a somewhat pessimistic view of the value of Olympic sponsorship. They give several reasons:
The Games are dominating media coverage today, but that will change shortly.
Chief executives love the pomp and circumstance, but it’s unclear whether shareholders really benefit from their investment.
For the next couple weeks, the Olympics will dominate our airwaves and brainwaves. Come September, though, the presidential election will be back in the spotlight.
Cost-benefit analysis may not bear out the wisdom of sponsorship:
Economist Alexander Molchanov found that expensive sponsorship bids erase almost all the benefit for Olympic partners. In other words, corporations are spending so much money winning sponsorships that they can’t benefit financially from the extra exposure. Perhaps companies like Lenovo (OTC: LNVGY.PK) and Eastman Kodak, which both bowed out in 2010, realized something that Coca-Cola and McDonald’s have not.
Sponsors may actually be helping their competition.
After the 1994 Winter Olympics, a team of researchers conducted a survey to find out if the average Joe knew who sponsored the Olympics that year. A mere 37% of respondents correctly identified McDonald’s and only 18% ID’d Coca-Cola. More astonishing, though, is that 57% incorrectly believed that Wendy’s (Nasdaq: WEN) was a sponsor and 7.5% thought that PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP) was doling out the drinks.
Do you think that the sponsors are getting their money’s worth out at the London Games?
Leave a Comment August 6, 2012
