Forget TV: Coke targets young with social media at the Olympics

The Olympics are all about youth but lead sponsor Coca-Cola says the television viewers are mainly over 45.

This is above the target audience for its products, so TV exposure is only part of a much more elaborate marketing campaign.

Sponsors are leaning heavily on Facebook, Twitter and iPhones to not only reach more young people but also turn them into brand messengers.

Eleven top corporate sponsors, including Coke, have collectively paid the International Olympic Committee just under $US1 billion in marketing rights for the London Games, due to start on July 27, and Vancouver’s 2010 winter Games.

Coke has sponsored the Olympics since 1928 and is trying to lure the YouTube generation with tools to create music videos that combine a company-commissioned song with personal photos and sports sound effects.

The customised music video – bookmarked with images of Coke bottles – can be shared by posting it on Coke’s Facebook page or company website. Users also can post their song to their own Facebook page or tweet the link more broadly.

Coke started by commissioning a song, Anywhere in the World, by Grammy Award-winning producer Mark Ronson and UK singer Katy B that incorporates rhythms and sounds athletes make, whether in table tennis or volleyball or other movements of five Olympic hopefuls, including US hurdler David Oliver and Singaporean archer Dayyan Jaffar.

Coke also produced a video of the song being performed with the athletes at a London concert, having invited thousands of young people to attend through Twitter.

Free software lets desktop users remix musical beats and Olympic sports sound effects to create new versions of the music video, also weaving in users’ personal photos from their Facebook pages.

Smartphone users can download a mobile application allowing them to remix the song even more, including software that captures the sounds of them moving their phones in different directions and turns them into beats.

More than three million such music videos have been posted already as part of Coke’s Move to the Beat Olympic marketing campaign.

The videos can be found through Coke’s Facebook page or the Olympic-focused section of the company’s website. Visitors can click on a spinning globe to hear uploaded versions from dozens of countries.

Coke also is building a two-storey Beat Box’ in London that visitors can walk through and create a new remix of Anywhere in the World by touching different panels. The hope is that the remixes will be downloaded into smartphones and forwarded to friends.

For its part, the IOC has launched a "Hub" website that helps fans find Olympians’ social-media postings, including their tweets.

Since the 2008 Games, the number of Facebook users has soared from about 100 million to more than 900 million. Fans on Coke’s Facebook page have surged above 43 million, roughly a 40-fold increase in four years.

The number of Twitter users has jumped to about 140 million from roughly one million over the same period. Coke, which wasn’t tweeting in 2008, now has more than half a million Twitter followers.

The company says more than 50 million of its customers have signed up to receive marketing emails or text messages – it hopes to recruit millions more by offering mobile Olympic updates.

But technology still has limits. Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, begins a week before the London Games get under way.

Coke says it won’t be activating its Olympic marketing campaign in the Middle East, deferring to religious tradition