When athletes travel to the Olympics, they often leave loved ones back home. Imagine: your child is going to the Games. But, due to different circumstances, you can’t attend.

When Intel became the Official VR Experience Provider for PyeongChang, we saw an opportunity to bring emotional meaning to VR—showing people that you don’t have to attend the Olympics to experience them as if you’re there.

We found Olympians in South Korea, Japan, China, and the US. We shot VR “love letters” with each athlete—letters we then shared with their families back home.

Families were able to race across the ice with Fan Kexin, fly 20 feet above the halfpipe with Ayumu Hirano, and reunite Marissa and Hannah Brandt—sisters training (and filmed) on opposite sides of the world.

And we were able to use VR in a new way—creating new fans of the technology as we did.

We produced three long-form docu-stories along with three corresponding VR experiences. We used the docu-series to drive fans to the Olympic VR app, where our VR films were pre-populated to give fans a taste of the VR experiences to come during the Games. Other VR placements included retail displays as well as the NYTimes VR app.

To align with the spike in Olympic interest, all efforts went live within the week of the Opening Ceremonies—as well as in coordination with the each athlete’s event schedule.

The work was adopted by multiple GEOs around the world, including US, China, Japan, Korea, W. Europe, Australia, etc. The films were distributed across online video & social channels—as well as deployed on .com and in employee communication such as the Intel HQ Lobby. 

As a first year, top sponsor of the Olympics, Intel topped the charts as the most talked about Olympic Partner in social media—capturing more than 2x share of voice of any other Olympic sponsor.

Coverage & Impressions of the 1st Winter Olympic Games broadcast in VR delivered large impressions and high engagement – 1 Billion impressions and 27M video views.

The campaign also compelled consumers to put on a headset and watch the Games with 60K hours of VR footage consumed—exceeding the Rio summer games 7x over.

Additionally, adoption of VR grew via 400k+ app downloads and a reported 800K unique sessions.