The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 were out of the ordinary. Postponed a year, closed to spectators, at a time when people had been forced apart. This presented a unique challenge.

We had to bring people together around the Olympics, connecting them to the Games and each other irrespective of their physical distance. We wanted to do this while continuing our transition to a people-centric brand, focusing on building connection and relevance with young people around the world.

To do this, the #StrongerTogether campaign was launched, aiming to inspire hope and bring people together through the Olympic Games, led by the voices of athletes, who told their stories of how they kept moving when the world around them stopped.

With a truly integrated campaign across 7 brand films, the Olympics website and app, fan innovations and digital partnerships, the objective in media planning was to help build excitement for, and

The Tokyo 2020 media strategy reflected the IOC's ambition of transitioning to a people-centric brand, focusing on building connection and relevance with young people. To connect with the audience our plan focused on Lean in environments where young people frequent with content/formats that bring them closer to the action.

We leveraged both Olympics' own platforms and key partners to create an omnichannel strategy across multiple touchpoints, all tied together by the #StrongerTogether campaign message across over 20 markets around the globe.

But we knew we had to go beyond just appearing in those lean in environments we had to be relevant to the audience. To build the Olympics. We needed to leverage time-sensitive and dynamic creative messaging to always appear relevant and timley all with the goal of establishing the Olympic digital channels as the go destinations for the latest Olympics news.

We used high-impact, mass awareness formats and partnerships to grow interest in the Olympic Games in the run-up, running TV ads in partnership with our Rightsholder Broadcasters, using impactful takeover formats such as TikTok #Challnage, AR Lens, and negotiating targeted OOH placements in prime locations such as Times Square.

To drive digital engagement onsite and in-app, we focused on automation and real-time personalisation to increase relevance by market and audience segment. This included a live medal engine on Facebook and Instagram, Schedule display for the events.

The real scale of the campaign came during the games across a 3 week period of real-time media planning adapting to the campaign performance and markets performance to flex the plan across different campaign tactics to drive performance and reach the audience. It included over 300 optimisations.

Tokyo 2020 was our most digitally engaged Olympic Games to date, with audiences interacting with the Olympics like never before.

The integrated media campaign was a key driver of digital engagement across platforms with:

11.2B Impresssions

45M Unique Site Visitors

250M Million Video Views

832K App Downloads

528 Hours of continuous service across the 3-week Games

6,548 Individual tailored assets

Along with engagement, survey results from Kantar saw that our Gen Z target audience were won over by the campaign:

20 Point Increase in Weekly engagement with the Olympics

Our data-driven plan, automated personalised creatives and agility in optimising campaigns enabled us to hit our performance target on Day 1 of the Games, resulting in 350% higher Unique Site Visitors versus target

10 Point increase in Brand Relevance

56% of Gen Z declared they would "Absolutely Love or seriously Like to interact with the Olympics" after Tokyo 2020