The Olympic Movement is a 113-year old brand. And moving into this year, the Movement was really feeling its age. Despite the hype around the Beijing Games, the brand appeal of the Olympics for global youth had been falling for years, and by 2008 the Olympics had a stronger association with heritage and tradition than with youthfulness and inspiration. The idea of an Olympic Movement had been lost.
We needed to reconnect youth with the values of the Olympic Movement. Through an integrated effort, including an effort embedded in social media, we found ways of inspiring youth to share in the Olympic spirit – celebrating what they are best at, and challenging the world to compete with them. We called it “The Best of Us Challenge.”

This global interactive experience gave kids around the world the chance to compete directly against famous Olympians. Athletes like Shawn Johnson and Michael Phelps created challenges based on simple human tricks, as did kids from around the world. We posted these challenges online and invited the whole world to try and beat them. At stake was a trip to the Olympics and other fun prizes.

We sent each athlete a camera to work with so that they, like the other participants, could film themselves. They had complete freedom in coming up their own unique challenge – whether that be hula hooping, tossing eggs or even putting golf balls into plastic cups.

Using both You Tube and olympic.org, we showcased all the videos. When kids visited the site they were asked to select any one of the challenges, to which they could then try to “best” that challenge or create their very own unique challenge that would be open to the entire world. Widgets allowed people to export that experience and provide a push and pull interaction with the Challenge content.

We leveraged social media to drive excitement and conversation around the Challenge and digital media stars helped build buzz around the campaign. They challenged the athletes and also created their own challenges, posting submissions for their youth fanbase.

Our effort created a new generation of evangelists around the Olympic Movement.
· Viewership of the Vancouver Games experienced over a 40% increase by young people.
· The brand received over 500,000,000 unpaid media impressions from the campaign – more than their paid media campaign could ever achieve.
· We gained over 5MM views of Challenges. Thousands of conversations. Hundreds of participants.
· Our Olympians challenged rank in the top 2% of most viewed YouTube videos of all time.
· The average time spent on our site 4 1/2 minutes (5x industry average)
· We had nearly 5,000 youtube subscribers (more than Glee’s You Tube Channel)
· Our videos made Ad Age’s “Top 10 viral video of the week” - 3 times, and our channel was the #10 most viewed YouTube channel.