London 2012 official sportswear partner Adidas released a mock music video on Sunday, in keeping with the Olympics' closing ceremony tribute to British music through the years. The video features members of Team GB including track and field star Jessica Ennis and Sir Chris Hoy. It's "directed" by David Beckham, with the British Olympians lip-synching Queen's "Can't Stop Me Now," and features the Twitter hashtag #stagetaken — a reference to the brand's "Take the Stage" campaign. 

"Our presence in and around the Olympic Games was fantastic," stated Herbert Hainer, CEO of the adidas Group, in a press release wrapping up the brand's London 2012 efforts and results. "It translates into record Olympic merchandise sales and a record year for the adidas Group in the UK. This clearly sets the stage for us to achieve market leadership in the UK by 2015."

An end-of-Games promotion from adidas invited fans to share their most "all-in" moment from the Games to win a pair of limited-edition London 2012 shoes from its Olympics customization studio as you can see below:Continue reading...

Olympics sponsor Adidas customized the red adiZero shoes worn by Britain's Olympics darling Jessica Ennis in gold, following her Heptathlon win on Saturday. (Check out how they did it below.) Adidas is also touting the Barricade 7.0 shoes that Andy Murray wore to beat Roger Federer in the men's tennis final on Sunday — marking Great Britain's first Olympic gold medal in tennis since 1908.Continue reading...

Coca-Cola ♥ the Olympic Games. After all, the soda maker has been lapping up the Olympics for every bit of marketing goodwill it can get for more than 80 years.

Now this year’s Olympics are in full swing and Coca-Cola can see the light at the end of the tunnel of its Move to the Beat campaign with singer Katy B and producer Mark Ronson that kicked off ahead of its sponsorship of the 8,000-mile Olympic torch relay. It's been a busy year with a variety of London 2012 marketing tie-ins.

And now Coca-Cola is extending its musical chops in a just-announced partnership with will.i.am to launch a sustainability-collaboration platform for brands dubbed EKOCYCLE, which is partnering to produce greener Beats by Dr Dre headphones — a brand that isn't music to the London Olympics organizers' ears.Continue reading...

Always a bonanza for marketers (as the New York Times' Stuart Elliott notes), campaigns pegged to the Olympics are often overly serious and attempt to be tearjerkers, as P&G knows all too well. Still, its Old Spice brand is retickling its Old Spice Guy funny bone by partnering again with W+K on an Olympics commercial. "I Will Live Forever," above, stars a skinny hero who listens to a self-help tape and somehow manages to win a slew of medals and a ton of hearts while smelling good all along the way.Continue reading...

The Olympics in London will kick off on July 27 with an Opening Ceremony that’s already been cut back a bit so that those attending will be able to get home on the trains. Of course, that’s if there are trains running at all. The AP is reporting that about 400 employees of the train system are threatening to strike. If that weren’t enough, border guards at Europe’s largest airport, Heathrow, are also saying they’ll walk off the job the night before the Games get started. Enjoy London, everybody who shelled out big bucks to get there. At least visitors can hop on one of the hard-to-miss sponsor-wrapped buses that CBS Outdoor UK is creating for the likes of Visa and other brands. More below on the latest from London.Continue reading...

With 32 days before the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games kick off in London....

Official sponsor McDonald's UK offers sneak peek at designer Wayne Hemingway's sustainable, Mad Men-inspired uniforms that will debut at its biggest restaurant (if for only six weeks), which is now under construction at the London Olympics Park:Continue reading...

There are fewer than 75 days left before the start of the XXX Olympics in London and sports marketing will no doubt be in the faces of consumers for most of that time and certainly during the Games themselves. But it won’t just be the big-bucks brands sponsoring the events or their big-name ambushing competitors that will be benefiting from the Olympics. 

“You’ve got a month’s worth of free advertising for the sports and sports-related industries,” commented Vincent Mitchell, professor of consumer marketing at Cass Business School in London, to Bloomberg Businessweek. “You’re likely to see gym subscriptions go up, activity-type holidays go up, sports drinks, athletic shoes, it will be a mass effect.”

Even the smallest of sports brands may get a lift from all the sports talk going on as well. For example, a few elite athletes such as cyclist Rebecca Romero and tennis pro Andy Murray have asked the relatively tiny Science in Sport, which was bought by Provexis last summer, to send over its sports gels and other products as they prepare for the main event.Continue reading...

The Olympics are coming to the United Kingdom and chocolate maker Cadbury, which is based in Birmingham, England, would like to give back a little something special to a few of the Queen’s loyal subjects in celebration.

Cadbury, an official sponsor of the London 2012 Games, has a few extra tickets to the Opening Ceremonies but they aren’t just going to wrap them up inside their candy bars like something out of Willie Wonka. Instead, the candy brand has teamed up with the Shazam music app and ITV to take consumers on a multimedia adventure.

Cadbury will first air an advertisement on the finale of ITV's Britain’s Got Talent on May 12 that asks viewers to use Shazam apps to identify a song, according to Marketing Week. The call to action invites viewers to “unwrap a virtual Cadbury chocolate bar to find out whether they have won tickets” or not. (Britain's Got Talent, on a sidenote, has had to suspend mobile voting due to technical issues.)

Marketing Week notes that ITV and Shazam recently partnered so that consumers can “interact with ads shown on the ITV Family of channels” and “use the audio-recognizing application to enter competitions, get additional information about a brand or download free music.” Cadbury is the first brand to take advantage of the possibilities of this new partnership.Continue reading...