Have you noticed only extraordinary people get appreciated and awarded? Why shouldn’t also ordinary people get medals and become champions? Last summer, while billions of people watched the Beijing Olympic Games, ordinary Romanians had their own Olympics! A competition that celebrated common people for their everyday small “sports” performances, for their everyday energy – Common People Olympics!

The program was done on behalf of Prigat, the leader in the Romanian soft drinks market, positioned precisely as the “energy giver” brand, which was relaunching to approach its consumers, the ordinary people. Our challenge was to do this in a memorable, crazy, vivid way, so that people do associate “Prigat” and “energy” forever.Therefore, for one month, thousands of people participated in a genuine Olympic competition, getting rewarded with the medals they had only seen on TV shining on sportsmen’s’ chests at ceremonies.

The competition included trials for more than 25 “sports” – funny real situations people face everyday, such as running after a bus, raising heavy shopping bags, running on high heels, jumping over a hole full of mud!

The results were amazing: huge word-of-mouth, thousands of participants, exceptional media exposure, and fast growing exposure in associating the brand with its main attribute.

The communication campaign lasted for two months (July-August 2008), whereas Olympics lasted for six weeks. The PR campaign consisted of numerous consecutive communication waves and press events which created big visibility, awareness and word-of-mouth for the contest and the brand.

These activities were framed after the competition calendar: a pre-launch to introduce the idea of Common People Olympics, the press event opening the competition, local press communication after each qualification stage and finally the closing event, which took place right during the Finals. Journalists were involved in the campaign both as participants and as mediators for the consumers.

In addition to PR, other three pillars were used: ATL (to link the Olympics to the brand), BTL (to organize the all the competition stages – local qualifications and the Finals) and online (to generate consumers involvement, besides the Olympics).The campaign ran according to the original plan, no adjustments were needed.

Common People Olympics was the first competition dedicated to what simple people do everyday and had a huge impact, surpassing our initial estimations.

Over 2,500 people competed in Common People Olympics (1.5 times more than expected) and another seven million watched them on TV. 40 journalists (from 90% of the pier publications in our press pool) attended the launching press conference, more than double our anticipation.

The campaign generated a total amount of 220 press articles, which is almost 200% more than the initial objective. More than 3,500,000 persons (out of Romania’s total population of 22,000,000 inhabitants) were exposed to campaign’s messages (outrunning our objective with 250%) only through PR efforts.

In terms of brand indicators, 65% of the respondents who knew about Prigat managed to associate it with “energy”, which means 10% over our initial objective.