Sponsorships & Businesses at the Olympics

I recently read a very interesting article on prdaily.com titled Brands winning big at London Olympics. It discussed social media and sponsorships during the Olympics this summer. Sponsorships are a big businesses, that bring in a lot of money.

 Although, these are being threatened due to social media. Each company has their own set of sponsorship rights protections in addition to a "brand exclusion zone" which extend for kilometers around venders preventing brands that aren't sponsors from displaying any ads or logos.

Online restrictions make things even more complicated by punishing fans for uploading pictures or videos onto public sites. Athletes may not comment on any competitors performance using twitter, facebook, or other social media. Also, they cannot promote any brand, product, or service, unless they are a sponsor.

The halo effect is said to have a positive effect on brands during the olympics. Many brands will get more business and attention to their brands. Consumers recognize brands from the olympics and USA team and will purchase them because the fact that they support them. So it makes them more favorable over similar products.

In addition to sponsor- event fit brand equity is one of the most important factors when measuring long term financial success of brand sponsors. Brand equity is the value a brand has over a generic competitor. Companies create this by making their brands memorable, recognizable.

Olympic sponsors should continue to be protected by the same laws. If they weren't it could jeopardize a companies success. Sponsors work very hard to support the Olympics and deserve the respect the earn for doing so.

Where it all begins...

I am currently a high school student in an interactive media and digital design class. I have created a blog to follow blogs i am interested in, and to create my own for classmates and others interested in what we are doing to read and follow along with what we do. We are only about five weeks into the school year, but that doesn't mean anything to us. From day one we took off. Working on projects, with clients(other students), and learning a bit about the business, and marketing world. Photoshop was one of the first things we tackled, with me never using photoshop before this was a little difficult, but with a little help from other students and teachers I got the hang of things pretty quickly. Next, we worked with prezi and started to learned the basics of marketing. We were given terms such as goods, public relations, co-branding, cooperative promotions, and many more. We had to find out the meaning of these terms. Then, we found pictures to describe the terms and put them in a prezi. It was a good project that helped us learn marketing basics. The things we have done so far have given us some expectations for the year and have started to help us learn to balance doing a couple different projects at once, and help with time management. I'm excited to see the outcome of this class and where i end up at the end of the year and I am hoping it will help me make a better decision for what i would like to do in college.