Now that the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi—aka the XXII Olympic Winter Games—have wrapped up, the iSpot team decided to take a deep dive into the data surrounding TV advertising during the event. First, some big-picture stats:
• More than 250 brands ran nearly 500 unique ads during the Olympic broadcasts in the United States.
• iSpot tracked nearly 9,000 airings (8,890) of individual spots during TV broadcasts of the spots across NBCU networks.
• Olympic ads generated almost 70 million views online, and nearly 3 million discreet social actions—including tweets, Facebook posts, and upvotes and downvotes for online versions of the ads on YouTube and iSpot.tv.
Now, some brand-centric insights:
• Procter & Gamble took home the gold in terms of the digital buzz its tear-jerking “Thank You, Mom” spot generated. The ad has racked up more 17 million views and spurred over 205,000 social actions since Feb. 7th, when the Games began.
• Samsung, an official Olympics sponsor, ran its Olympic-themed ads against CNN and NBA basketball and ABC Family but not against the games at all on a national level, as Advertising Age reported.
• Chevy, AT&T and McDonald’s occupied the most airtime, based on iSpot’s 24/7 tracking of every single airing of every ad run during Olympic TV broadcasts.
• Chevy, AT&T and Geico spent the most, based on iSpot’s estimated-spend calculations.
• BP’s “BP’s Team USA” was the most-run individual spot (168 airings).