A peak audience of 11.2 million watched Channel 4's broadcast of the rousing opening ceremony for the London 2012 Paralympic Games, titled “Enlightenment.” An average 7.7 million tuned in to see the four-hour show on August 29th. (Not coincidentally, the Queen entered the stadium at 8:45pm, when viewing peaked.)

The British broadcaster reported that it was its largest audience in more than 10 years. "Last night's opening ceremony was a spectacular start to the London 2012 Paralympic Games," said Channel 4's Jay Hunt. "I'm delighted that so many viewers enjoyed it with us." 

The ceremony, inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest and following on from the "pandemonium" of the London 2012 Games Opening Ceremony, focused on the story of scientific discovery and education.

Sir Ian McKellen danced to a stirring version of "I Am What I Am," as the stadium was transformed into a representation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. Accompanied by narration from physicist Stephen Hawking, a new musical piece based on Newton’s Principia Mathematica underscored the theme of the Games: ability and achievement come in many forms.Continue reading...

Brits were unhappy when Dutch brewer Heineken was named the official beer of the London Olympics. After all, the British have got plenty of brewskis that they make within their own borders, and it would have been nice if the cash Heineken made from selling more than 527,000 gallons of beer during the Games had gone to a British company.

However, even that river of beer didn’t help Heineken overcome the falling beer sales of Europe. Its Western Europe beer sales for the first six months of the year declined 2.9 percent. And that’s after the Olympics sponsorship as well as the Champions League, which gathers together the best club soccer teams in Europe to battle it out for bragging rights.

Luckily for Heineken, it had “strong sales in Asia, Africa and the US” in the first six months of the year, according to Marketing Week, and it ended up with its worldwide revenue jumping up 5 percent to €8.8 billion ($11 billion).  Continue reading...

Anheuser-Busch and Major League Baseball extend partnership.

Best Buy lavishes compensation on new CEO.

Delhaize bets big on retailing in Greece despite economic turmoil.

Dell and HP struggle to sell PCs.

Denver bans outdoor advertising for medical marijuana outlets.

Larry Ellison buys Hawaiian island and everyone wonders what Oracle founder will do with it.

Exelon benefits from ties to Obama administration, New York Times says.

Fox and Ad Council use Glee to target texting while driving.

General Mills, McDonald's and other marketers are accused by feds of collecting data about kids. Continue reading...

Candy and soda are better known as guilty pleasures than elements of a healthy diet, but the folks at Coca-Cola would really like the world’s politicians to stop linking cola with obesity, which has gotten to be so large a target it arguably could be known as Public Enemy No. 1.

The word in Ottawa is that the city is planning an outreach to its residents to help them make better health decisions, encouraging them to eat better and exercise more. Coca-Cola Canada execs are so wary of the coming effort that at least four of them have sent the same letter to the mayor to let him know that the company “strongly opposes any program that uses taxpayer dollars to unfairly target our products and mislead consumers,” the Ottawa Citizen reports.

“We expect Ottawa Public Health, as a public institution, to be a source of neutral and unbiased information for consumers,” the letters went on, pointing out that obesity in Canada had grown while consumption of sugared drinks had gone down. Continue reading...

With the 2012 Olympic Games a week away, brands are beginning to get an idea of just how much of a bump they got from a few weeks in London at the most watched event in TV watching history.

When it comes to the most effective ambush marketing campaigns, there is no shortage of contenders. Paddy Power took true ambush action and suffered the International Olympic Committee's significant wrath. BMW's Mini executed probably the most garish ambush strategy during the discus and javelin events. And it's easy to see Nike as a favorite. Its "greatness" campaign was a hit from America to China.

But another brand stood out more than Nike -- from America to China -- and saw an immediate, significant sales increase. It's a brand that appears to be making unconventional marketing its core platform for brand building: Beats by Dr. Dre. Continue reading...

Just before and during the London Olympics, athletes were not allowed to tweet support for advertisers and marketers unless they were official sponsors of the Games. This led to a few of them being so irked that they tweeted with such hash tags as #wedemandchange and #rule40 so the general public could see that it wasn’t all rainbows and Happy Meals at the Olympic Village.

The ban has been lifted and one of the fastest to take advantage, of course, was the Fastest Man in the World, Usain Bolt. As Ad Age points out, the above Gatorade ad he appears in explicitly notes that the company wasn’t an official sponsor, with a narrator saying, "We weren't there on stadium billboards. We weren't there on double-decker buses. We weren't on buttons, souvenirs or commemorative snow globes. We weren't there officially sponsoring anything. We were there for real -- inside the bodies of some of the greatest athletes on earth." While the voice rolls on, a mysterious figure wearing a hood walks the streets of London before being revealed to be Bolt. Continue reading...

Back at the start of the year, when consumers were asked what brands popped to mind when they thought of the Olympics, Nike was the number-one answer. Of course, it didn’t matter that Nike wasn’t actually an official sponsor of the event, but why quibble with such trivial details? In fact, Nike did a good job keeping attention on them during the Games themselves with the brilliant pushing-the-rules ad “Find Your Greatness.”

The point is, brands can shell out truckloads of cash to be involved in and event organizers can employ hundreds of “brand police” to ensure their paid sponsors aren’t getting screwed, but that doesn’t mean that when the Olympics end, people aren’t left saying, “I really should drink Coke more often!” or “Wouldn’t it be great to have a little more Panasonic around the house?”

YouGov BrandIndex, a daily consumer perception research service of brands, insists that only two of the partners for London 2012 “broke through in any significant way in consumer perception while a few had “very modest or no significant movement” or even “went backwards,” according to a company release. Continue reading...

While the 2008 Games were in Beijing, it was the London Olympics that provided a mature opportunity for athletic wear names -- both international and domestic -- to brand-build in the China market.

We have already looked at the success Li-Ning had with its "make a change" campaign and Nike's ambush "greatness" campaign, as well as Nike's last second retooling of its Liu Xiang sponsorship.

But what about other Chinese brands like 361°, Peak and Anta? A few had a smashing time in London. Continue reading...