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 find ways to bring people together around the Olympic Games, 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.

Leveraging digital partnerships and building bespoke playable experiences were an integral part of the brief to engage fans and bring the global Olympic community closer together. The goal was to create the most digitally-engaged Olympic Games ever, bringing the action at Tokyo 2020 to life in new and innovative ways.

Our objective was to build the relevance and connection with the next generation of Olympic fans, whilst ensuring we told the story & spirit of Olympism through different lenses.

As an element of this, we wanted to reach casual Olympic fans, which we defined as Community Lovers and Followers. To engage these audiences we tapped into their desire to be knowledgable in conversations and capitalise on the social currency of the games during Tokyo 2020, when casual fans often become an "Olympic Expert".

Our media campaign focused on mass-awareness on Twitter for these two audiences using previous historic Olympic tweets to encourage participation and engage the global fan audience on Twitter. Through this campaign, we armed the casual Olympic fans with niche sports knowledge, that they could use to spark interesting conversations with their friends and created a direct link to the Olympics through active engagement and a value exchange.

We started with a tease phase just before the Olympics began, surfacing ‘Olympic expert’ tweets from previous years and informing people that the #ExpertEngine was coming soon.

On the day of the Olympic Opening Ceremony, we launched the #ExpertEngine and invited people to try it out. By Tweeting #ExpertEngine @Olympics + an Olympic #Sport, users would instantly receive an auto-response with an animated video and a unique fact related to that particular sport.

The campaign generated a pool of users which we then retargeted with Olympics highlights through other formats such as video website cards.

We focused our media on four key markets with high Olympic interest (US, France, India and Japan) to provide the most value to our fans

The success of Tokyo 2020 can be seen around the world, and Tokyo 2020 was the most digitally-engaged Olympics ever.

The Twitter expert engine was able to drive strong engagement with the Twitter FanBase including:

- 50X more Tweet engagements than the average for the sports industry for a BAU campaign

- Over 6M Video Views

The campaign was also critical in driving the wider Tokyo performance, 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

10 Point increase in Brand Relevance