The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 were out of the ordinary.

Postponed a year. Closed to spectators. A time when people had been forced apart. This presented a unique challenge.

We had to find ways 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.

With social media a key source of sporting news for younger generations of Olympic fans, we saw an opportunity - connecting fans to the action in real-time, creating excitement through immediately seeing wins from their local Olympians. This led to the development of the Custom Medal Engine, a first-of-its-kind bespoke tool for the automatic generation of Facebook and Instagram animated ads showing event results as soon as a medal was won.

Leveraging the first-party data available via the Olympic Data Feed, the Custom Medal Engine gathered data on the medal type, countries, athlete names, sports and events of the medal winners in real-time. This data was filtered, normalised to readable copy and translated to match the winning country's language. The copy was injected along with corresponding graphic assets into the creation of a templated video along with automatically generated localized ad copy.

Additionally, to match the new Olympics.com landing pages created when results are updated, the Custom Medal Engine also dynamically created landing page URLs using data from the feed to ensure a seamless user experience on click through from the ad.

Working closely with Facebook ensured that the solution interfaced directly with the platform via API, enabling us to publish the ads and deliver event results to fans of the featured sport in the winning country in real-time.

As soon as a medal was won during Tokyo 2020, the Custom Medal Engine automatically generated a Facebook and Instagram dynamic ad using imagery and copy tailored to the sport and winning country. Collaborating with Meta enabled us to bypass the 24-hour ad review process, ensuring that the ads went live immediately after the medal was confirmed.

After 3 months of work to build the functionality through Facebook for Developers and extensive testing, the campaign was successfully launched on the day of the first medal event. Covering 29 Olympic sports and eight countries, the tool created up to 251 ad variations that were immediately served to audiences in the winning countries.

By automating the entire process of producing and publishing a high volume of ads in real-time, the Custom Medal Engine led to an estimated savings of more than 62 hours of manual work.

As soon as a medal was won during Tokyo 2020, the Custom Medal Engine automatically generated a Facebook and Instagram dynamic ad using imagery and copy tailored to the sport and winning country. Collaborating with Meta enabled us to bypass the 24-hour ad review process, ensuring that the ads went live immediately after the medal was confirmed.

After 3 months of work to build the functionality through Facebook for Developers and extensive testing, the campaign was successfully launched on the day of the first medal event. Covering 29 Olympic sports and eight countries, the tool created up to 251 ad variations that were immediately served to audiences in the winning countries.

By automating the entire process of producing and publishing a high volume of ads in real-time, the Custom Medal Engine led to an estimated savings of more than 62 hours of manual work.

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

The Custom Medial Engine contributed to this success, with 251 bespoke and automatically generated ad variations reaching over 86M people in 8 countries and 310M impresssions. The targeted social approach delivered 19.6M Social Engagements, fulfilling the ambition of reaching the younger generation of fans in particular.

In addition to delivering exceptional engagement with our audience, the Custom Medal Engine also provided the team with strategic benefits by unlocking more than 62 hours of savings in manual work through creative and media automation.