The Olympics and Paralympics partnership is a big deal for brands. None more so than for Toyota, especially for their ‘home’ games in Tokyo. However, as it’s a global relationship the amplification content can also be quite global, with little meaningful relevance to local UK audiences.

The brief was to drive positive brand re-evaluation and brand love by communicating Toyota’s mobility vision through its support for Team GB and ParalympicsGB, getting people closer to our local athlete ambassadors.

Our local amplification had to work alongside the global content, but express Toyota’s vision with local relevance. Driving greater engagement, understanding and appeal by speaking more directly to our UK audience with messages they can relate to.

Key objectives:

Increase Brand Salience from 17% Pre-Games

Increase Brand Consideration

Improve Brand Opinion

Increase key metric of ‘Enriches & Improves people’s lives’ from 29% Pre-Games

Insight: Before winning big, athletes have to deal with a lot of everyday tasks which adds strain to an already very tough training schedule.

So, just as you would expect a sportswear brand to post shoes or tracksuits, we sent our athletes our latest mobility innovation to assist them in their training.

Which of course the athletes misuse completely, by making the Robot undertake everyday tasks that it’s over qualified for—freeing up invaluable time for the athletes to train.

This was a local activation of a HUGE global sponsorship, accompanied by a HUGE global campaign. Our approach was to complement the global campaign and communicate Toyota’s ambition in a more locally relatable way.

We needed to

GET: a UK audience of Olympics/Paralympics fans who are used to the big global corporate sponsorship content

TO: Associate Toyota as an Olympic sponsor and a brand that enriches & improves people’s lives

BY: standing out from the big spending Olympics partner crowd (including Toyota’s own global campaign) in an unexpected way with tone more relatable to them, showing Toyota’s direct support for Team GB and ParalympicsGB.

Our campaign ran across TV idents, online, in cinema and On Demand, as well as on social media in the run up to, and during the Olympic and Paralympic games in Tokyo 2020 (July-August 2021).

12m+ views of the hero film on Youtube and Twitter.

40% of viewers watched at least half of the longer film vs 26% for the Toyota’s global content.

Sponsorship coverage reached more than 22m people

75% of sponsorship ident viewers had an improved opinion of Toyota

70% of viewers of the sponsored Paralympic coverage said they were more likely to consider Toyota

Brand Salience increase from 17% Pre games to 25% post Games.

Contributed to an increase in the metric ‘Enriches & Improves people’s lives’:

36% vs pre-Games 29%