International Olympic Committee: Custom Medal Engine

In 2020, the world’s biggest sporting event was postponed a year. On it’s return, Tokyo 2020 would be staged without fans, at a time when people and communities had been distanced by covid. Against this backdrop, the International Olympic Committees' marketing campaign ambition was simple, to bring people together once again, irrespective of their physical distance, and drive unity through connection with the Olympic Games. To help realize this goal, Essence were tasked with building a bespoke solution to bring medal win announcements to people all around the world the instant they occurred. With over 1,000 medals up for grabs, this was a great opportunity to bring people together to celebrate the sporting achievements of athletes from around the World.

Our solution, the Custom Medal Engine was born. An Essence in-house tool that automatically generates ad creative showing event results in real-time. Integrating with the Olympic data feed the solution needed to automatically create and populate image and copy across thousands of iterations of possible athletes, languages and medal type, before then pushing live ads across Instagram and Facebook feeds. As a result of the real-time creatives generated, meticulous optimisations and effective use of social channels the campaign was 15% more efficient for driving users to Olympics.com than benchmarks. We also saw conversion rates increase by 63% compared to the benchmarks.