Brands That We’re Giving a Gold Medal

With an average of 27.5 million viewers, the Rio Olympics provided an incomparable marketing platform for many big brands to reach a worldwide audience.

In the aftermath of the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games we’ve taken a look back at some of the most memorable marketing campaigns and advertisements from this year. 

1. ‘Thank you Mom’ by Procter & Gamble

See the full advertisement here. 

Tissues at the ready! Arguably the most emotive campaign of the summer, P&G’s ‘Thank you Mom’ ad created for the London 2012 games, resurfaced for 2016, pulling on our heartstrings once again.

The ad shows flashbacks of Olympic athletes from this year’s games as children with their mothers supporting them from the sidelines. The campaigns tagline was ‘It takes someone strong to make someone strong. Thank you Mom’. A link was added to the video for 2016 leading to a webpage that allowed viewers to send a personalised message to thank their own mothers.

2. ‘The Human Family’ by Apple

See the full advertisement here. 

The Olympic Games are more than just a celebration of athletic achievement, they provide a rare opportunity to bring together different cultures from around the Globe to focus on a single goal

Apple’s campaign focused on this aspect of the games with their beautifully shot advert comprising photographs and videos of people from all around the world shot on an iPhone, with Maya Angelou reading passages from her poem ‘Human Family’. The campaign celebrates the differences between individuals but ends with the message ‘We are more alike my friend than we are unlike’ – despite these differences, we are all just people.

3. #Superfans by Panasonic UK

See the full campaign website here. 

Ahead of the Games, in April 2016, Panasonic launched their #Superfans campaign. Team GB fans were encouraged to post pictures on social media with the hashtag, with the idea of generating encouragement for the British team and keep up fan momentum after the London 2012 Games.

Panasonic also offered Twitter contests, including the chance to win a Panasonic TV, as extra incentives for fans to make posts. The crowdsourced campaign proved incredibly popular. Check out some of the entries below:

4. #ThatsGold by Coca-Cola

See the full advertisement here. 

Coca-Cola launched their #ThatsGold campaign way back in January 2016 with the release of the ‘Taste the Feeling’ advert. The campaign compared the excitement of winning a gold medal at the Olympics to the joy of having a good time with friends and family, using a combination of colourful visuals and inspiring quotes, building up to the line at the end, ‘Gold is a feeling that anyone can taste’, emphasising that ‘gold moments’ can happen every day.

Coca-Cola also launched a ‘real-time marketing’ global hub with 23 consumer interaction centres to track the #ThatsGold hashtag around the world. With this information they took to Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook to generate content covering the crucial moments of the Games.

Following this stage of the campaign, Coca-Cola set up a ‘Gold Room’ station in Rio where visitors could create 360-degree images to share on social media.

 5. #BeTheFastest by Virgin Media

See the full advertisement here. 

Virgin Media’s Olympic campaign was all about highlighting the importance of speed, drawing parallels between their WiFi and the ‘ultrafast’ Usain Bolt.

In 2009, Bolt set the World Record for the 100-metre sprint at 9.58 seconds at the Berlin Athletic World Championships. Virgin Media’s advert imagined what 9.58 seconds of speed felt like on a physical and emotional level, by combining ten different sequences about an aspect of Bolt’s life, all lasting 9.58 seconds each.

Whilst promoting Virgin Media’s competitive edge in technology, the advert is also a great tribute to Usain Bolt.