Nike planning to tweet ads during Olympics

Nike is basing their social marketing strategy for the summer around the belief that people are going to be avidly tweeting during the London 2012 Summer Olympic basketball games. Nike's Jordan brand is planning a series of promoted tweets that are going to pertain to the current discussion on Twitter. Every time the Team USA men's basketball team takes the court, the brand is going to have real-time comments directly related to the game in progress. The ads are set to include links and brand content.


The ads are only going to appear for individuals that follow Olympic or basketball related accounts. The choice was made to focus on the accounts are following on Twitter rather than focusing on tweets posted. This seems like a smart choice, considering that the amount of people that read content outnumbers the amount of people that actively post content.

The tweets are focused on a large audience, far beyond the traditional followers that Nike already has. The idea behind using tweets pertaining to real-time action is to have people be swept up in the moment and hopefully retweet these promoted tweets. The idea that if 'regular' users start retweeting the ad, it is no longer an ad, but just another piece of the conversation.

One interesting fact is that Nike is not an official sponsor of the Olympics, but still wants to benefit from the attention, though indirectly. Only time will tell, but if this turns out to be a success for Nike, chances are that we will see the ongoing social discourse on Twitter targeted more heavily during large-scale events.