Mobile – 2012: Who will exploit the Olympics opportunity?

“I can’t wait to see what the Olympics unleashes in terms of mobile,” Google’s Scott Beaumont told delegates at MediaTel Group’s Mobile – 2012, The Year of Reckoning? event last week.

Michael Bayler, strategist and author, Bayler & Associates, believes Coca Cola will be the leading brand as the drinks company has “a huge amount of resource and money invested in the Olympics this year”.

Although Simon Andrews, founder of addictive!, predicts that Nike will take centre stage with its mobile strategy this summer.

Meanwhile, Chris Alliott, senior telecoms analyst at RBS, thinks brands which manage to come up with utilities will be the most successful. “Brands need to provide something simple and useful,” he said – suggesting that ideas around social media, location, maps and travel will work best.

Chris Gobby, head of data and insights at Everything Everywhere, explained that his business is trying to “open up operator data around the Olympics”, though they have not solved how they are going to do it yet. “It is a big opportunity, we just need to crack it,” he said.