To celebrate the beginning of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games and drive awareness of Gillette (P&G) as a best-in-class Olympic sponsor, Gillette wanted to wish Team USA off to a Great Start in a truly unique way.

We turned Boston, Gillette’s hometown, into a canvas and lit it up in the spirit of global sportsmanship on the evening of the Opening Ceremonies.

A series of light displays projected footage showcasing the powerful starts of Gillette Ambassador Athletes Ryan Lochte and Tyson Gay, leading people to Boston Harbor, where the event culminated in a massive light and water show.

Footage of Team USA athletes was splashed onto buildings leading up to the harbor, where six separate projectors displayed King-Kong-size holograms of sprinter Tyson Gay and swimmer Ryan Lochte on two massive screens of particulate water vapor sprayed above the Harbor.

The holograms reached upwards of 20 meters in height, 60 meters wide. Adding further majesty to the video capturing the event, the show is scored by M83's anthemic "Steve McQueen."

We started with over 60 hours of rotoscoping, as well as high speed Alexa and Phantom source material. The event used ten 20k projectors and two 35k projectors.

We staged the outdoor event in front of a live audience, capturing the event on HD video, and then released the video on YouTube 12 hours later, in time for the first appearances of Tyson Gay and Ryan Lochte at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

As the athletes performed, search results from around the world drove viewership to the video. The video ends with a clear call to action, to purchase the Limited Edition Fusion ProGlide razor through an e-commerce partner.

As planned, Ryan Lochte secured his first Gold of the Olympic Games, and the drive to viewership, ER Impressions and click through to e-commerce purchases of the Fusion ProGlide razor began.

We earned first page organic placement for search relating to Ryan Lochte, and maintained that position throughout the Olympic Games. ER impressions surpassed 417 million (173 million uniques, 244 million press release pickup).

The video CTA (Buy Now) was 18x better at driving trial generation than the average banner ad from Gillette, reaching 6% click through rate during first 36 hours of the video release.