Sponsor Spotlight - Visa's London VIP Lounge; Real-Time Twitter Tracker

Visa's London VIP Lounge

Visa will have a VIP lounge for Chase cardholders at the London 2012 Games.

Cardholders can reserve a spot for themselves and up to five guests each night during the Games at the lounge. Celebrity chef Masaharu Morimoto will appear at the lounge and provide guests with a selection of dishes.

"Iron Chef" Morimoto will present takes on British, American and Asian cuisines for guests nightly throughout the Olympics.

Olympic Sponsors Refuse Tax Exemptions

Visa and General Electric follow McDonald's and Coca-Cola in refusing to claim tax exemptions on Olympic revenue.

Although the tax exemptions sparked controversy, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola said their decisions were not influenced by the protests.

Four of the biggest sponsors of the Olympics, each of the companies paid almost $1 billion to sponsor both the Winter and Summer Games.

The tax exemptions also apply to foreign athletes who are normally required to pay taxes on their earnings.

Sponsors Not Taking Advantage of Social Media

Research conducted by YouGov reveals that Olympic sponsors may not be benefiting from their association with the London Games.

The data, examined by Marketing Week, was compiled using YouGov’s social media audience measurement tool (SoMA). SoMA monitors more than 10,000 UK-based Twitter accounts to determine how the public is responding to the Games.

Dow Chemical, McDonald’s, Omega, Visa, British Airways and ArcelorMittal were the only companies for which Olympic-related words ranked in the top five associated topics. Of those, only Omega was consistently connected to the Olympics in a positive way.

Sponsors that supported other events, such as Adidas for Euro 2012, were identified more often and more positively with those events than with the Olympics.

As the data does not take into account the presence of sponsors on other social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn, many companies do not see an explicit connection on Twitter as indicative of brandhealth.

Real-Time Twitter Tracker Launched

Brandwatch partnered with MediaCom Sport to launch a data visualization tool and Twitter tracker on Friday.

The "Buzz Board" monitors mentions of Olympic sponsors in real-time and measures both the volume of mentions and the general sentiment of those mentions.

The Twitter tracker awards each brand with a score based on a formula that combines "sentiment, engagement and reach metrics". The brands are then ranked according to their Twitter performance score.

The immediacy of the online tools reveals how quickly brands need to react to feedback in order to impact public perception.

Written by Hannah Reid.

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