Eurosport Case Study: “Don’t Blink – Eurosport & the London 2012 Olympic Games”.

Commercial partners

The London 2012 Olympic Games not only presented itself as a unique editorial and content opportunity for Eurosport, but for a commercial channel it was also a compelling offer to the official Olympic sponsors. Eurosport was also the only commercial TV channel in the UK to broadcast the Games, creating a clear USP.

Many of the commercial partnerships which Eurosport developed were aligned to the technical delivery of the Games across the multi-screen environment, the natural place for a broadcaster, commercial brands and sports fans to converge.

Ahead of the Games Eurosport launched its Player app on Android in partnership with Samsung, a Worldwide Olympic Partner, which enabled fans to follow the live action on their mobile, with free subscriptions to customers who bought the new Galaxy S111 handsets.

Eurosport has enjoyed a long partnership with Panasonic with HD and now this expanded into the promotion of 3D. Commercial deals were also struck with sportswear firm ASICS and ACER, another Worldwide Olympic Partner, whose ICONIA tablets had access to Eurosport streams.

Results

So what were the results after years of preparation and planning for two weeks of intense delivery?

In fact the Games were a clear success with average TV audience levels rising by 80% during Games time and 106 million different viewers watching Eurosport’s coverage.

Online Eurosport.com attracted nearly 5.6m daily visitors during London 2012, 4.4m on the web and 1.2m on mobile, 36% higher than its yearly average daily global audience.

The hard facts are one thing, the feedback from fans was also positive with Eurosport’s Facebook page growing by 30% and Twitter community by 20% during the 16 days of competition.

Home of rising stars

So what next? In 2013 Eurosport will continue its commitment to live sport and broadcast 18 different World Championships across summer and winter sports.

After London 2012 Eurosport signed a long term agreement with FISU, which delivers the World Student Games which feature both winter and summer Olympic disciplines. This partnership is designed to showcase not only the rising sporting stars but to ensure the Olympic sports can be broadcast on a regular basis outside of the Olympic cycle.

Eurosport is perfectly placed to deliver this given its experience in the Olympics and its live sport credentials  and will be broadcasting from the 2013 Universiade Events in Kazan in July and Trentino in December 2013…

And Eurosport will continue its promotion of the rising stars of sport in its role as the European broadcast partner of the NextGen Football Series.

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