The Rio Olympics is the stage for the world’s best athletes, we used it to attract the world’s best software engineers. As a technology partner to the Olympics, GE machines in Rio initiated conversations on twitter in a language that only coders would understand – binary code.

This allowed us to engage a hard-to-reach audience who had zero interest in hearing from GE.

But to really pique their interest, we gave coders something they couldn't resist, a challenge. Hidden in the machines’ tweets was a 3-part tech challenge against software-enabled machines.

The first challenge was to take the machines’ binary tweets and translate them into ASCII art.

The second, was to write code to find binary hidden in a gigapixel image, or participants could spend days searching for it manually.

The final challenge did coders’ heads in. An image of what appeared to be a GE logo was tweeted and participants were given no more guidance than this. The trick was to recognize the wavy lines in the image as a spectogram, then write code to reconstruct sound from the image to reveal a secret URL.

Zoltan Szabo was the first to complete the challenges in 15 days, winning the $10,000 prize.

As a technology partner to the Olympics, GE machines working at the Rio Games initiated conversations on twitter in binary code, a language that was sure to attract the attention of software engineers.

Hidden in these binary tweets were challenges coders lost their minds over.

The first, was to turn binary from GE_LED1’s twitter feed into ASCII art.

The second, was to write code to find binary hidden in a gigapixel image. Or you could spend days searching for it.

The final challenge did coders’ heads in. An image of what appeared to be a GE logo was tweeted and participants were given no more guidance than this. The trick was to recognize the wavy lines in the image as sound, then write code to reconstruct sound from the image to reveal a secret URL.

Zoltan Szabo was the first to complete the challenges in 15 days, winning $10,000.

The campaign not only got some of the world’s best software engineers and data scientists to participate, but also attracted a significant amount of PR, and traffic across key markets.

GEeks go for #cc9900 got the global media talking about GE as a tech company with over 19,000,000 media impressions globally.

It also got the world’s top tech talent participating in the campaign with over 110,000 unique website visits (a massive number for a niche audience) from over 138 countries around the world.

Best of all, there was a 27% increase in recruitment of coders.