‘Twitter Olympics’ named as most interactive yet
With the dying embers of the Olympic flame still casting a glow over London Starcom MediaVest have published figures suggesting that the fortnight long spectacle was the most interactive Games yet.
Describing the Games as a ‘watershed in behaviour’ the Games saw a whopping 90% of the UK population follow the event through a combination of TV, PC, mobile, tablet and social media.
Principally this saw 21.9m viewers tune into over 24 dedicated video feeds via interactive TV and online with 6.6m pressing the red button for the first time.
They were joined by 7.2m who harnessed their phone or tablet device to access the service, 28% of whom used mobile media in a new way for the first time and 2.7m who read or posted about events whilst watching the sport unfold on their televsions.
Scott Thompson, digital research manager at Starcom MediaVest Group UK said: “The BBC’s broad coverage of the Games has clearly introduced new media technologies and behaviours to new audiences. The huge volume of coverage posed a new challenge for many consumers – how to navigate dozens of channels and thousands of hours of TV footage to find the events they wanted to watch. For many, TV’s red button provided the solution and – even though it has been around for over a decade – gave 6.6 million viewers their first real reason to experiment with it.”
“Once people have cleared the initial hurdle of experimenting with new technologies or behaviours, the barrier to repeating them is lowered as they have a clearer understanding of the benefits, and the confidence to use them again. We expect to see more evidence of these sorts of behaviours in the future.”