As tier one sponsor of London 2012 and official airline partner of Team GB and ParalympicsGB, British Airways wanted to make famous its role in the Olympic Games by throwing down the gauntlet to competing nations, and rallying support for Team GB.

The concept of the ‘home advantage’ – where the team playing in its home surroundings is said to have a psychological edge - is familiar to people throughout the world.

We took the notion of the home advantage and created a piece of activity which would capture mass media and consumer attention in the run up to the London Games. On the day that the first plane carrying the first delegation of Olympic athletes arrived, a giant mural of Team GB star and poster girl for the Games, Jessica Ennis, was placed directly beneath the Heathrow airport flightpath, alongside the message ‘Welcome To Our Turf #HomeAdvantage.’

With an estimated 600,000 vistors from overseas visiting the capital during the Games, the giant image of British Olympic heptathlete and face of Team GB, Jessica Ennis, was positioned directly under the Heathrow flight path.

The image was designed on computer and vectorised, to allow it to be scaled to a size visible from an aeroplane. The equivalent size of 15 tennis courts and 193 London buses, it was painted onto the field using over 600 litres of special weatherproof turf paint and a robot. It was displayed for five weeks in the run up to the Games and was re-touched at regular intervals to keep it fresh.

The image of the mural in place was sold in to media to generate earned media coverage across on and offline channels, and to spark buzz on Twitter via the #homeadvantage hashtag.

- 60 pieces of earned media coverage seen by 60 million people

- Overall, British Airways had the highest volume of coverage of all tier one sponsors during the Games, equating to a quarter of all sponsor coverage (source: Precise)

- By the end of the Games, British Airways’ Olympic sponsorship awareness rose by 19 percentage points to 54 per cent (Source: Millward Brown)

- British Airways was revealed to be the brand most associated with the Games (Source: PRWeek/OnePoll)

- The wider #homeadvantage hashtag was used nearly 1,000 times during the stunt - roughly one third of these directly referencing the stunt