Bridgestone Americas, Inc. (Bridgestone), a subsidiary of the world’s largest tire and rubber company and the Official Tire of the Olympic Games, with its agencies, launched a campaign featuring Team Bridgestone athletes - all designed to celebrate “Clutch Performance”.

Historically, Bridgestone approached the Olympic Games with a TV-focused media plan, having digital - especially social - play a much smaller supporting role. But, our brief was to make the client’s dollars work harder, so the agency leveraged social partnerships that would amplify the brand voice. The goal was simple: rewrite Olympic Games marketing history by using a “SOCIAL FIRST” mantra on this global marketing stage. We knew the power of social targeting through behavior, interests, locations and how that is critical to customers’ purchase journeys. Our goal was to reach 200 million impressions and roughly 30 million engagements with a reduced spend - but we far exceeded those outlined goals.

We launched an immersive digital brand experience featuring Team Bridgestone athletes, comprised of previous Olympians, up-and-comers, and Paralympians - superstars like Elana Meyers Taylor, Erin Jackson, Nathan Chen, Ashley Wagner, Amy Purdy and Evan Strong. The campaign was comprised of a series of dynamic videos profiling Team Bridgestone and highlighted how great athletes – and Bridgestone tires – consistently perform. The agency teams led shoots resulting in well over 20 highly-produced video assets, and amplified this content to consumers while they were actively engaging during and long after the Olympics Games.

Our content did more than offer a glimpse of an athlete. We worked tirelessly to find human connections, focusing our messaging around key goals and performance-driven verbiage. We connected concepts of Preparation, Consistency, Control and other brand-ownable messages including inspiration with youth athletes and behind-the-scenes footage. Our full-circle approach dovetailed perfectly into a voracious social appetite, achieving medal-winning results.

When it comes to developing an influencer strategy for Bridgestone, we start by asking why we’re engaging with influencers and how they will support business objectives. We initially look at REACH - the size of a potential influencer’s audience. However, while reach is an important metric, there are many instances in which a smaller audience is more engaged, therefore providing more value. Which takes us to a more critical need for our new strategy for the 2018 Olympic Games: RESONANCE.

Combining engagement-rate data with a voice that paralleled the Bridgestone mantra to perform when it matters most, we were able to craft a formula to catapult an already-engaging person to a new level with our custom content. That relevance we examined through demographic, psychographic, and brand interests married the two worlds together and helped collectively push out a focused, driven and premium voice of Bridgestone to the American audience.

Our Bridgestone 2018 Winter Olympics strategy was able to more than double the brand’s engagement on social media compared to previous years, and boosted brand affinity long past the event through our influencer activations.

Outside of the content shared directly from Bridgestone handles, we leveraged our influencers to extend brand awareness onto their own channels by publishing videos natively, sharing content from Bridgestone, and maintaining an ongoing relationship with the brand following the Games (even into 2019).

U.S. Women’s Bobsled Team star Elana Meyers Taylor, who won a Silver Medal in PyeongChang, shared her unique perspective: “Being able to share my story on a greater platform has been tremendous to my career... partnering with Bridgestone has been an incredible journey.” And that journey extended far past Elana. We also found unique ways to lift all six athletes to the forefront of American social appreciation.

Our shift to a social-first media approach created an incredible and undeniable impact, increasing digital revenue roughly 35% during this campaign between February 2018 through May 2018 (versus the 2016 Olympics campaign). This came despite a 25% decrease in spend; yet created 50% more impressions and 104% more engagements.

We created nearly 223 million impressions via the activation, resulting in unprecedented brand exposure. More importantly, the final numbers exposed a staggering level of engagement, which topped 53 million engagements. Among the incredible praise across press outlets was a study by Turnkey Sports and SportsBusiness Journal which shared that Bridgestone was one of only two global brands who, “improved their standing the most with consumers during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics” (via BizJournals.com) - landing praise as one of the two best Olympic Games activations for 2018.