Olympic madness hits London...

I was lucky enough to visit the Olympic park on Saturday to have a wander around, sit in the sun and soak up the atmosphere. I can honestly say that it was fantastic, the volunteers were engaging and friendly, the train service was on-time and not over crowded and the park looks stunning.

What did strike me though was the amount of branding scattered through out the park. I'm sure it wasn't only me that picked up on the fact that all drinks were supplied by Coca Cola, you could only pay with Visa and that their brand names, logos and colours were all over the place! I can appreciate that they have paid a lot of money to sponsor the event and this is their return but does that approach of blanket advertising really work?

Well, according to IAB, it appears that it does:

Report from @iabuk @iab @mojiva shows UK consumers more likely to respond to mobile ads from official Olympic sponsors bit.ly/QVSQFE
— IAB UK (@IABUK) August 1, 2012

A winning situation for the sponsors and a bonus for the visitors that the sponsorship money has delivered such an amazing Olympic Park. If you can get there then it's well worth a visit!

Mobile devices... should we be worried?

I read an interesting posting by Mike Nolan at Edge Hill University about the use of mobile devices to view their website. So, in the interests of sharing information I thought i'd not a similar exercise for us! I've matched the dates used to run the report, 14th April – 13th June 2010 and included the resulting pie chart stats of unique visits below.

What you might notice is that we are also seeing a large number of visits from iPhone and iPod users to the website. In fact, the only really difference seems to be that we have more SymbianOS users, probably due to our selection of company mobile phone more than anything else.

So, should we be worried about the increase in mobile usage? Probably not just yet, our site is optimised to work rather well on Apple devices and by the time mobile browsing really takes off, things will have changed again! Just to put the sizes in context the total amount of visits for that period is 454,186...

One last thought though... poor LG...