The ad begins with icy winds blowing across a dark, frozen landscape. A small, solitary figure marches across the horizon. For a brief moment, she comes into focus—and she’s wearing a red Canadian Olympic team jersey.
“Something in my inmost thinking tells me I am one with you,” mutters a husky male voiceover.
It’s not exactly par for the course for Canadian Olympic marketing, or any sports commercial, for that matter. But for Sochi, the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) has elevated its game.
The lone heroine in this spot is champion bobsledder Kaillie Humphries, one of this country’s Olympic stars. But the ad is just one part of the COC’s epic new campaign for the team, which launched on Jan. 1 with seven TV spots in all, including an equally epic 60-second spot that aired during the NHL’s Winter Classic game (though they teased some digital content beforehand). Its tagline and hashtag, “We are Winter” (“Nous sommes l’hiver”), sounds almost too chilly and ominous to be a sports slogan—more Game of Thrones than Olympic Games. But the hashtag, which helped the Canadian Olympic team recently reach 100,000 followers, is downright inspiring when paired with the TV and print imagery that forms the most impressive part of the campaign.
The COC is going for drama, with the idea that Canadian athleticism deserves to be celebrated on a grander scale. Other countries, such as the U.S., have long made a bigger deal of their Olympians—they grace billboards and have far greater visibility. Now Canada is following suit, and the COC is aiming high. Aside from the TV spots, the “We Are Winter” campaign includes mini-documentaries on different athletes, pre-show ads in Cineplex theatres, billboards, print and a big social media push.
“If we arrive at a point where our Olympians are just as recognizable as the prototypical hockey player, that would be fantastic,” says COC chief marketing officer Derek Kent, the Canadian marketing doyen once picked by Nike in the U.S. to run its media relations team in New York.
The Olympic rings symbol is one of the world’s most powerful logos—more globally recognizable than any other, according to some measures. Until now, the COC’s marketers had a simple approach, and it worked well enough: provide broadcasters and corporate partners with the rights to the Canadian version of that brand, and leave the content largely in their well-financed hands. That has meant a wide array of looks for Canada’s Olympic spirit, most memorably in the form of Hudson’s Bay red-and-white fuzzy mittens.
By contrast, the “We Are Winter” campaign sees the COC taking the content reins, as well as allowing its partners to develop ads of their own. The COC shot close to 100 hours of footage over the past year. By becoming a serious content producer, the COC is marking a sea change in how it approaches selling the Olympics to Canadians.
“Broadcasters don’t create an image of the Olympic team, they just broadcast the content,” explains David Soberman, Canadian national chair in strategic marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “The Olympic team creating more of an image for themselves will only deliver more value to the broadcaster. More publicity, that means more viewership. The more viewers of the ad, the stronger that image becomes. It’s a virtuous circle. If I was a broadcaster, I’d be like ‘This is great.’”
The campaign might be timed for Sochi, but Kent plans to build lasting brand value. “If we invest in marketing… demonstrate that our athletes are amazing assets and can be for partners, there’s no doubt in my mind they’ll sign up athletes as partners and focus their advertising campaigns around them,” says Kent, mentioning the COC’s new partnership with Sport Chek. A stronger brand for the COC will mean everyone wins: the Olympics, the athletes and the broadcasters.
The COC began shooting footage for the campaign in March of last year, and is working with an impressive roster of creators, including director Henry Lu and agency Proximity Canada (which found the 19th-century poem In the Winter Woods by Frederick George Scott, part of which is used in the voiceover for Humphries’ solo march through the snow).
“I don’t know that the COC has ever shot with cranes, with a professional production team,” says Kent. “I remember when we were shooting [freestlye mogul skier] Mikaël Kingsbury, we were up at 5 a.m., and you take a snowcat up because none of the chairlifts were working. This was in Whistler… If you look over, it’s hundreds of feet down.”
But high risk brings high rewards. With the ambitious shoots and spectacular content, the COC believes it has created more than a new campaign. It’s a new identity for Canada at the Olympics.
“If a country has a genetic code, winter’s part of our genetic code,” says Soberman. Making it about winter more than any individual sport is clever, he adds. “They show athletes overcoming nature, overcoming the cold. The reason you do that is you make it more relatable to the average Canadian. The average Canadian has to overcome winter. We can all relate to overcoming nature. We maybe all can’t relate to beating five other guys in a speed skating contest.”
For more with Derek Kent, pick up the Jan/Feb issue of Marketing, on newsstands now and available on your iPad.
