• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, August 7, 2012

Leading up to and during the first 10 days of the 2012 Olympics, TV ads from Chobani, General Electric and Coca-Cola have earned the highest average Ace Scores among official Team USA and London Olympics sponsors, reports Ace Metrix. 

The Ace Score measures the effectiveness of advertising creative, based on surveys of a representative sample of the U.S. TV viewing audience. Attributes including relevance, persuasion, “watchability,” information and attention are measured to arrive at Ace Scores ranging from 1 to 950.

Chobani has pulled an average score of 594 with its “Proudly With You” ad, part of its integrated sponsorship campaign, which celebrates how the spirit and hard work of its employees and partners have driven the rapid success that have enabled the brand to become a Team USA sponsor. 

GE not only has the highest-scoring ad to date — “First Chance” (646 Ace), telling the story of how GE incubator donations have helped saved the lives of premature or sick babies in the Homerton Hospital in East London – but the second-highest average Ace score to date (589).

Coca-Cola has the third-highest average score (579), reflecting more than a dozen consistently high-scoring ads.

In addition to GE’s “First Chance,” the highest-scoring single ads to date include two Procter & Gamble efforts: “Hardest Job in the World” (638) and “Kids 2012” (636), each taking a different creative approach to celebrating the moms of Olympic competitors from around the world.

These ads are part of P&G’s “Thank You, Mom” campaign. Three of the nearly 30 ads in that campaign have made the Ace top 10 among Olympics ads to date. However, a few lower-scoring efforts kept P&G out of the top three for highest Ace average score, according to Ace Metrix. 

The factor common to the best-performing ads has been their ability to enable brands to make an emotional connection across the entire Olympics-viewing audience, noted Ace Metrix CEO Peter Daboll.

Daboll also observed that many brands are trying a number of different creative approaches within their Olympics campaigns, sometimes with consistent success, sometimes with mixed results. 

Nike, for example, has aired eight different ads on the theme of “normal people finding their greatness,” and four are connecting well across demographics, while four are “falling extremely short, well below the category and Olympics norm,” he reports.