Sainsbury’s were appointed in May as the first multi-million pound Paralympics-only sponsor of the London 2012 Games in what organisers claim is the biggest ever deal for the Paralympic Movement.

The move followed rapidly growing interest in the London 2012 Paralympics with Channel 4 securing the rights to cover the Gmes earlier this year and official London 2012 Paralympic mascot Mandeville proving highly popular since he was revealed to the public just two weeks after the Sainsbury’s London 2012 sponsorship deal was announced.

But the recently published Tamar Sports Index Volume 3 research reveals the spikes in online interest around the 2012 Games are perfect opportunities for associated brands to raise awareness, pull people to sites, win more customers and drive revenues.

This suggests that while the Sainsbury’s news announcement about the ground-breaking sponsorship was extremely well received and mentioned in a phenomenal number of online and offline sources, the supermarket brand failed to build on this brief spike in online attention.

Tamar claim very few sources that picked up the news provided links to Sainsbury’s web assets and the announcement from the company itself had no visible links to the Paralympics or to any online resources created by the supermarket brand, either on its consumer site or on the corporate site.

The brand harnessed social sharing sites like Twitter and Flickr to spread the initial news but appeared to have little more to offer in terms of sustained engagement through social media through links back to relevant Paralympics sponsorship content.

A Paralympics section on the main website would have leveraged the impressive online spike in attention over the longer term thereby adding more value by association to the brand, Tamar claimed.

With relevant sports content or even a simple official announcement page, many people would have linked back to this information and Sainsbury’s would have been seen by the search engines as having highly relevant content which would have raise its profile on the search page returns.

Tanya Goodin, the chief executive of Tamar, said: "We’re sure that the sponsorship will be a huge boost for the Paralympics athletes in two years’ time but for all brands developing online strategies associated with sponsorship, the windows of opportunity can be very small and they should make the most of them.

"While Sainsbury’s received significant exposure for the innovative and very welcome sponsorship, the first wave of publicity lacked the marketing punch as none of the online articles contained links back to Sainsbury’s and only a few linked to the Paralympics site."

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