The Hidden Brand is an action that turned Colombiana, the most popular and recognized soft drink brand in Colombia, into a protagonist in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, achieving what not even the world's major sponsors have been able to do: put their logo on the uniforms of the athletes in competition. A practice prohibited by the International Olympic Committee through the well-known 50th Rule of the Olympic Charter. All this was achieved by putting the brand's iconic logo on the Olympic cycling team's jerseys and removing just two letters.

Situation: Colombiana sponsors the Colombian Olympic and Paralympic Cycling Teams in BMX, track and road modalities. Like all other team sponsors, we were asked to remove our logo from the jersey to comply with rule 50th .

Brief: How to take advantage of sponsoring the Colombian Olympic Cycling Team in a world event that restricts even the official sponsors to put their brands on the competitions?

Objectives: To be recognized by Colombians as the brand that supports Colombian cycling in Tokyo 2020.

The Colombiana brand carries the name of Colombia. So, when designing the uniforms, we took the risk of keeping our logo by making just one small change: removing two letters. In this manner, while the Olympic committee and the rest of the world read "Colombia", Colombians following the games saw our brand on the track and on the podium.

Colombiana is the national soft drink brand with more than 100 years in the market, making it the most popular and recognized in the country. We took advantage of the iconicity of our logo to keep it on the uniforms, so that Colombians watching the games, news and competitions from any corner of the world would recognize the brand.

We started by putting Colombiana’s logo on the jerseys, deleting the two final letters to become the name of the country, "Colombia". The next step was to apply it to the rest of the uniform.

We launched the jerseys during the opening of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games from our social networks. It was supported with organic content from the Colombian Cycling Federation's social media and those of the competing athletes known around the world.

In each competition, we generated content before and at the end of each race, so that Colombians could see our brand from the warmup until the athletes won the prized Olympic medals.

For more than 15 days, cycling enthusiasts and media around the world followed our athletes, sharing the news on TV, social networks and print media. Images that will remain forever in the history of cycling and the games.

According to independent research conducted on behalf of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), approximately 3 billion people around the world saw and shared content where Colombian cyclists wore our brand on their uniforms. And all Colombians who connected to the broadcasts and saw the news the next day on television, digital and print media, recognized Colombiana in the athletes' uniforms.

Competing brands invest millions of dollars to be the top partners of the Olympic Games or to implement bombastic ambush marketing ideas that do not even manage to put their logo on the competitor’s uniforms. With only $100,000 USD, we managed to put our brand on the Colombian Olympic cycling team that was followed by all the world media thanks to their performance, as they won several medals in the Olympic and Paralympic competitions.