In his keynote address at CES 2017, Under Armour founder/chief executive Kevin Plank had a long wind-up to the afternoon’s highlight: multiple gold-medal Olympian Michael Phelps on stage, encouraging everyone in the auditorium to get up and “Jump Around” to the infectious beat of the House of Pain anthem. Phelps was doing more than dancing. All it takes is six jumps for him to activate his brand new Under Armour shoes, connected to the company’s MyFitnessPal app as of February 1. The company also introduced a new focus on sleep. Continue reading Under Armour Collects Data for Smart Shoes, Digital Pajamas

NBCUniversal handed control of its Snapchat account to BuzzFeed during the Summer Olympics, giving nearly total editorial control of its Discover channel to 12 BuzzFeed video producers on location in Rio. The BuzzFeed team produced up to 20 pieces daily, with a focus on the athletes and local activities. The experiment of distributing content via social platforms and the media/messaging app resulted in a big win for NBCU, generating 2.2 billion views across the pop-up Discover channel and daily Live Stories, for a total of 230 million minutes of consumption. Continue reading NBCU Hands Snapchat Account to BuzzFeed and Earns Gold

To lure millennials to watch the Rio Olympics, which run August 5 to 21, NBC is enlisting 24 Internet celebrities to build buzz. For the first time, NBC is using a portion of its marketing budget on digital influencers such as German DJ/comedian Flula Borg, who has 779,000+ YouTube fans, to appear in videos with U.S. Olympic athletes, including Michael Phelps, Missy Franklin, Maya Moore and Claressa Shields. The YouTube celebrities tapped for videos have 120 million followers on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Vine. Continue reading NBC Inks Deals with Digital Celebrities to Promote Olympics