When tonight's Opening Ceremony kicks off for the 2012 London Olympic Games, all eyes will be on what has been hailed in the lead-up as “the digital Olympics” or “the world’s first social Games”.  And while so much will be captured during the Games themselves, the social revolution around the Games began weeks if not months ago for both athletes and sponsors.

The 25 main global and local sponsors have paid dearly for their official rights.  Estimates of up to $1.6 billion have been reported.  But of course sponsorship rights are just part of the cost.  Much more is spent on marketing activity to maximize sponsors’ involvement and support.

Advertising Age recently reported on some of the more significant campaigns, and some of these sponsors also highlighted their Olympic programs when their CMOs spoke at last month’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.  Coca-Cola’s Joe Tripodi showcased the brand’s “Move to the Beat” effort aimed at teens globally.  Visa’s Antonio Lucio spoke about his brand featuring triumphant moments in Olympic history – and Olympic Gold Medal Winner Nadia Comaneci joined his seminar on the main stage.  And P&G’s Marc Pritchard presented his brand’s “Proud Sponsor of Mom” campaign, complete with “mommymetries” aka short documentaries about mom, or mum in some parts of the world.

Other brands championing major Olympic programs include McDonald’s with its “Champions of Play” campaign, GE with its Healthy Share app on Facebook, and Samsung with its US Olympic Genome Project.

All of these campaigns kicked in long before tonight's Opening Ceremony.  UK social media consultancy Sociagility started tracking Olympic sponsors' social media profiles 100 days ago.  At first, P&G led by a long shot, followed by BMW and Cadbury in the silver and bronze positions respectively.  But last week's scorecard shows Coca-Cola winning gold, followed by British Airways and adidas.  P&G had dropped down to 8th position followed by BMW as a top performer.

With such a dynamic shift on the social Olympic leader board, it will be interesting to see further movement during the Games.  It may be that brands like Coke and adidas have more affinity with the Olympics versus newer sponsors like P&G, Cadbury and BMW. 

Only time will tell.  There certainly is no shortage of activity in the main social channels, and much of the conversation is likely to be around the Olympics during the Games.  In his article “Why Social Media Will Reshape the 2012 Olympics,” Mashable’s Sam Laird recently documented social’s growth since the last Olympics, from 6 million registered Twitter users to 500 million since 2008; and from 100 million Facebook users to more than 900 million in the same time frame.  Worth checking out the Infographic he also posted on “How Mobile, Social Will Win the 2012 Olympics” sourced from Nielsen, eMarketer and Forrester.

And fresh out today from AllTwitter is a new infographic on "The Socialympics and the Twitter Games" which claims that with the BBC expecting 1 terabit per second of traffic, the Olympics are set to strain the UK's internet infrastructure.

Let the social games begin!

Last week’s CMO Club Summit presented an array of content eagerly consumed by CMOs attending the two-day conference.  And while not all of the subjects included a digital element in the title of the session, digital, search and social certainly was woven throughout most of the presentations, not surprisingly.

So, when the question arose over why everything was about digital during our final lunch, I wondered how someone could even ask such a thing.  Isn't digital pervasive in every aspect of marketing; indeed in every aspect of business. I'm guessing this CMO was just concerned that so many topics focused on digital and social media almost to the detriment of leaving out other traditional topics – rather than how digital is woven through all we do as marketers.  This CMO went on to clarify her point by suggesting additional content around more traditional marketing topics like advertising, promotions, creativity, etc.  Perhaps CMOs are getting weary of the digital emphasis.

And yet, just yesterday Advertising Age published a story about more growth in digital.  “Last year, US agencies generated 30.3% of revenue, or $10.1 billion, from digital, compared with 28% in 2010,” according to the article.  “Digital revenue at agencies surged 16.4% in 2011, with growth across agency disciplines.”

Clearly digital is here to stay, thrive and expand with new technologies, platforms and devices.  So, the subject matter at the CMO Club Summit around digital transformation, innovation in search, delivering with digital, ranking high on Google, innovation in mobile and bridging the digital divide were most clearly relevant for today’s CMOs.  But perhaps we should also be thinking more cleverly around topics that are either languishing or relatively unexplored such as interactive television, diversity marketing, sponsorship and the like.

As a strong advocate for digital, I’ll happily gobble-up content around the subject and I’m always eager to hear about new developments.  Equally though, I worry that we just grasp at the bright new shiny toys and forget our grounding in old-fashioned creativity, story-telling and coming up with the big idea which can be integrated across new – as well as more traditional – channels and platforms.