Leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics, the International Olympic Committee approached us for help in getting kids around the world excited about the Games. In response to this we created "The Best of Us Challenge", a global interactive experience that gave kids all around the world the chance to compete directly against famous Olympians. We targeted famous athletes like Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps and asked them to create challenges based on silly human tricks. Then we put 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.

To create the video content, we sent each athlete a camera to work with so that they, like the participants, could film themselves. The athletes were given complete freedom in coming up their own unique challenge.Next we built a dynamic website to showcase all the athlete videos. When kids visited the site they were asked to select any one of the athlete challenges, to which they could then try to 'best' that challenge. They were also given the option of creating their very own unique challenge that would be open to the entire world.We created widgets, available on the website. The widget content was updated regularly to feature the latest athlete challenges.Finally we reached out to digital media stars to build buzz around the campaign. They challenged the athletes and also created their own challenges, posting submissions on their emerging media youth fanbase we were trying to reach through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube pages....everywhere really.

"The Best of Us Challenge" has been very successful.People in more than 200 countries around the world have viewed the challenge. We received over 250 user submissions to athlete challenges alone. 4 million people have watched our video content. Almost half of the athlete Challenge videos (10 out of 23) have received more than 100,000 video views, which puts them in the top 2% of most viewed YouTube videos of all time. We’ve recorded tens of millions social media impressions. And TBOUC was featured on the Today Show and in The New York Times.In total, we expect around 250 million earned impressions, which equates to an approx. paid media spend of $1.2 million.All of this was accomplished with zero dollars spent on paid media.