Newsdesk played the leading role in our ability to quickly find and understand the news coverage for each of these sponsors. It is clear from our data that Visa (Gold), McDonald’s (Silver), and Coca-Cola (Bronze) were the winners in terms of highest volume of news mentions.

The coverage was not always positive. Each day there was backlash against the International Olympic Committee for allowing the sponsors to dictate the food, payment methods, and even logos that appeared on clothing worn by spectators and athletes at the Olympic Games.

It wasn’t all negative, though. Visa’s series of real-time congratulatory commercials for medalists were quite popular. Also, several athletes had their victory celebrations at McDonald’s after winning their medals, which was widely covered.

The primary goal of this blog series was to quickly find and report relevant data . To this end Newsdesk performed very well.

We built searches beforehand for each top sponsor and included variations on their brand names (e.g. Coca-Cola and Coke). The search results automatically fed into dynamic charts, which helped us visualize the leaders for the previous day. Creating these searches took a little time and thought up-front, but after that it was “set it and forget it”.

Each day we used our charts to identify the day’s leaders. Then we scanned the headlines to see which topics were driving coverage. This took us just a minute or two. From there, it was simple to see trends and find single articles that typified them.

We wrote the blog posts and were done. All-in-all, it was a very quick process and easily repeatable every day.

This is something you could do for your own blog. Tell us in the comments if you would like someone to show you how.

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?

Visa is hoping that there is no such thing as bad publicity after a system malfunction left spectators unable to pay with their Visa cards at Wembley Stadium. Unfortunately, as a condition of their sponsorship, Visa is the only accepted credit card at the 2012 Olympics, leading to long lines for concessions and disgruntled visitors.

This mishap was the main feature on dozens of sites and gained a passing mention in many more.

On the positive side of things, Visa did get good coverage with their real-time congratulatory commercial for Emilie Heyman:

[Visa] introduced a new congratulatory commercial celebrating Emilie Heyman’s bronze medal performance in women’s synchronized 3-metre springboard at the London 2012 Olympic Games. The spot, entitled “Congratulations Emilie,” aired on Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium and features an image of Emilie on the podium in London.

Visa had more coverage than Coke and GE combined.

Our medalists for most news coverage on the 30th of July are:

• Gold: Visa
• Silver: Coke
  
• Bronze: GE

After taking Bronze over the weekend, Samsung did not place in the top 3 today and GE won their first medal.

What is your opinion about Visa’s sponsorship? Even with the troubles at Wembley, was it still a good move to have a monopoly on payments at the games? Tell us in the comments!

As the opening ceremony of the Games of the XXX Olympiad kicks off this evening, billions of people in more than 200 countries and territories will be watching. Without a doubt, the Olympics are the biggest sporting event on the planet. And according to the official Olympics’ website ”one of the most effective international marketing platforms in the world.” But what does “most effective” mean for the 11 worldwide sponsors of this year’s Olympics?

To see who gets the most bang for their buck, we’re monitoring the media coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Sponsors:  ACER, ATOS, Coke,  DOW, GE, McDonalds, Omega, Panasonic, P&G, Samsung, and Visa.

With the help of our award-winning news and research tool, Newsdesk (read about how the top sponsors develop their campaigns), we’ll be mining the data and stories and reporting back to you on how the companies and brands are making out. From traditional news and social media mentions to online reputation management, over the course of the games, we’ll look at what this year’s sponsors are getting for spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars tying their brand to the Olympic rings.

So check back here every day for our updated analysis. Let us know in the comments what you would like us to examine.