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 fan community closer together. The goal was to provide the most digitally-engaged Olympic Games ever and bring Tokyo 2020 to live in new and exciting ways for global fans.

With Olympic fans and athletes’ families and friends unable to travel to Tokyo for this edition of the Olympic Games, we decided to bring the Olympic spirit to life virtually on TikTok. The core objective was to create a feeling of community; to give both fans and various Olympic stakeholders the means to celebrate these Games together in spite of the pandemic-related restrictions.

We launched the #OlympicSpirit hashtag challenge, inviting users to show how they were getting into the Olympic spirit, whether it meant watching the Games with their family at home, creating original Olympic-inspired art, cheering for their national team or re-enacting Olympic sports in their living room.

We needed to leverage social partnerships to start building a direct-to-consumer relationship between GenZ and the Olympics, ultimately establishing Olympic channels as the go-to destination for any Olympic-related content.

Our initial alignment with both our channel and key digital partners ensured that all activities were working towards the same objective - building connection and relevance with the next generation of Olympic fans and ensuring we tell the story & spirit of Olympism through different lenses, to engage and excite fans.

While the key consumer audience was GenZ we also had the task of engaging the wider Olympic ecosystem to use the @Olympics TikTok channel. We built the hashtag challenge and the hub so that broadcasters, National Olympic Committees, and Olympians were able to gain greater exposure on the channel, and share authentic messaging directly with Olympic fans.

The challenge launched just days before the Opening Ceremony. We teamed up with TikTok to create awareness within the product through a combination of banners and notifications. We also communicated the initiative widely across the Olympic ecosystem, engaging broadcasters, National Olympic Committees and individual athlete influencers to join in, resulting in an exciting user-generated content.

Using the hashtag #OlympicSpirit we were able to bring the Olympic community and fans together and each individual fan to feel strongly connected and engaged with the Olympic Games.

Olympians were also able to break down the barrier with fans by giving the world a direct look behind the scenes of the Olympic experience, focusing on the athlete village, bringing audiences closer to the action than ever before.

The activation blew all estimates out of the water. There were 6 Billion views of #OlympicSpirit TikToks during the 17 days of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. The TikTok audience around the world could not get enough of it and they wanted more content. The Olympics gained 1.8M followers during the 2020 games and there were 20M visits to the Olympics hub.

Survey results from Kantar suggest that we fulfilled our ambition of building connection and relevance with the Gen Z target audience.

20 Point Increase in Weekly engagement with the Olympics

10 Point increase in Brand Relevance

56% of Gen Z declared they would "Absolutely Love or seriously Like to interact with the Olympics" after Tokyo 2020