Discovery drops its Beijing Winter Olympics campaign
Discovery has unveiled its Winter Olympics 2022 content and marketing plans with under two weeks until the Opening Ceremony in Beijing.
Discovery is to leverage its free-to-air and pay-TV channels to push out its TV ad, along with social spots and high-impact out-of-home (OOH) ads.
Details of its content and marketing plans follow the release of the BBC’s stop-motion trailer on Friday January 21. Both sponsors and broadcasters have been late out of the gate for their Winter Olympic activations, which has led marketers to speculate if the Chinese political situation has fostered a nervousness.
The one-minute TV ad is a first-person view of a compilation of winter sports that ends with a bobsleigh bringing the viewer back into their living room. 30-second cut-downs have been made, along with curated Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat video content. Snapchat filters will also be made available during the Games.
It was created by R/GA. Discovery pushed out the agency’s work on the Olympic Refugee Team campaign for the Tokyo Summer Games.
The Olympics is a key driver of subscriptions for Eurosport and Discovery+. Andrew Georgiou, president of sport at Discovery, said: “[Discovery has] got much better at getting subscribers into our ecosystem and using it as a subscription driver.”
Georgiou predicted that Beijing will be the best Games for subscriber engagement and retention due to various tech innovations and improvements in production.
“We showed in Tokyo that we could deliver exceptional and unique Olympic Games coverage, even in the middle of a pandemic. For Beijing 2022, our unrivaled line-up of experts, industry-leading technology and ambitious approach by placing all the live action on Discovery+ alongside real-life entertainment content will once again engage viewers for longer, both during and after the Games,” added Georgiou.
Discovery, via its Eurosport channels and subscription VOD Discovery+, will broadcast Olympic coverage to 50 countries in 19 languages. Due to its reach, Discovery is to focus on key marketing including UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Italy and Netherlands.