The Olympics are getting a LOT of engagement

We’re now into the second week of Olympics coverage, and it’s fair to say the games have grabbed people’s attention. Even in a vacuum, 45 million engagements still sounds like a lot, but put into context with the other big sporting events of the summer the Olympic Games are truly in a class of their own.

The Euros and the Copa America both took place earlier in the summer, and English-language coverage received 9.7 million engagements and 2.3 million engagements respectively. These are not insignificant numbers, but there was an early clue how much interest the Olympics were going to drive. Even a month before the games began, there were days when they were receiving more engagement than the soccer events that were actively happening.

This then jumped when the games themselves started, as the Olympics also enjoyed the luxury of being the only major sporting event in town, with nothing running concurrently. 

This level of earned media represents a huge opportunity for the brands sponsoring the games, with a huge amount of organic attention being paid, and it’s clearly resonating with the public in a massive way, and we can illustrate that with a couple of examples. 

Samsung, a long-time Olympic sponsor, made a splash online for its latest collaboration with K-pop group Tomorrow X Together, who have become “Galaxy Ambassadors” for the brand. The two united to release a new single that encapsulates the spirit of openness and resilience, and features several Olympic and Paralympic athletes in the music video. Media coverage of the collaboration earned over 16.6k engagements, and was easily the biggest narrative to come out of Samsung’s Olympic sponsorship so far. 

On social, Omega has captured attention around its Olympic sponsorship, but not for ones including actual athletes. Instead, the luxury watch manufacturer earned hundreds of thousands of engagements with posts from celebrity brand ambassadors attending the Olympics. The biggest of these came from Paul Wesley and Kaia Gerber who both shared a carousel of images showing their experience.

In terms of the top publishers covering the Olympics, a mix of mainstream news outlets stand out. The Daily Mail earned the highest overall engagement, accumulating over 1.25 million engagements with its 6.6k articles. Today.com, while trailing behind with a total of 894k engagements, achieved that number from only 443 articles, a fraction of what the Daily Mail’s output was.

To learn more about how you can monitor events in NewsWhip Spike, reach out to chat with our team.