Get Geared Up For The Winter Olympics: PyeongChang 2018

On 9th February 2018, the world watched on as the 23rd Winter Olympics kicked off in PyeongChang, South Korea.

In honour of the special event, we looked at the key brands officially partnering the event and how they’re engaging Olympic fans this year using video content on social media.

We also show how driving content, using the influencer strategy, can create an impact to post engagement and reach.

ALIBABA GROUP

“Kenyan Hockey Team Dreams Big”

Chinese multinational e-commerce giant Alibaba Group are one of the worldwide partners for the event. A first for the brand and one of the few who will be working with the Olympics until 2028. In January, Alibaba Group launched their “To The Greatness of Small” campaign, featuring three powerful video commercials. The brand decided to broadcast these videos online in China, the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom.

The first commercial, features an ice hockey team from Kenya with dreams of one day qualifying for the Winter Olympic Games. A very similar storyline to one Jamaican bobsled team – the video posted on the brand’s Facebook page generated the most engagement out of the three commercials. The touching and aspirational story received 7,130 engagements of which 5,014 were Likes. The number of comments are not that strong, however, with 131 comments it certainly has started an online conversation.

VISA

TEAM VISA – “Finding New Finish Lines”

Visa made a play by kick-starting their global campaign also with a video ad. Aside from posting the video on the brand’s social channels, they used Team Visa Athlete’s to upload snippets of the advertisement on their very own social media pages. The motive is for the finance brand to reach out to a younger demographic during the upcoming Olympics in PyeongChang.

Using our Content Drilldown section, we looked at the post’s performance on the Visa South Korea Facebook Page itself. The results are surprising as with a 0.03% engagement rate meaning they didn’t get many fans interacting with the post. However, when we look into the results of the influencers IG pages, the interaction between post and fans is significantly different.

American alpine ski racer, Mikaela Shiffrin, is one of the Team Visa members to push the ad on her social channel. Being a Paid Partnership, by incorporating the official event’s hashtag (#PyeongChang) and tagging her ‘team’ (@visa_us) resulted in an engagement of 9,930…what a jump! Short track speed skater, Seung Hee Park, also posted the Visa ad to her 16.7k Followers on Instagram. Compared to the results from Visa South Korea’s FB page, the total engagement of the post on her channel did increase with 367 interaction, of which 352 were comments of support to the Korean Athlete.

Working with video content has given both brands the awareness they need from an event and identity perspective. However, what is really achieving high engagement is the use of influencers. Visa’s campaign is another example of how influencer marketing, particularly on Instagram, can gain value for brands.

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