The Challenge

End of madness recap

Published by Esteban Glas on September 18th, 2008 | This post lacks all category except for: Lenovo, Olympic Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0

Warning! Massive post.

As the events that happened between August 8 and August 24 start to slip to memory-land I thought it would be nice to do a recap of what we did last summer. Hope you enjoy it, or that you live long enough to read it thoroughly.

The right move at the right moment.

"Bird's Nest" Shot. Courtesy of Ogilvy 360.

Besides what our marketing statements said (that this were the first Games where athletes were allowed to blog) there are several other reasons why this made sense.

First and foremost: Amateurism. Yeah, I know, most of this guys aren’t exactly amateurs in the full sense of the word, but you get the point. The same program applied to, say, the Football (soccer) world cup, wouldn’t of worked as well as it did for the Olympics. Most athletes at an Olympiad are not celebrities. They might have a small degree of recognition, but the general public does not know them.

That radically changes during the Games. The public eye is in search of these people, hungry for news and stories. That is where we came in, providing content straight from the source.

The time zone difference also played a big part. Most of the action happened while the western hemisphere was sleeping or at work. This made the internet a key player.

The Right Mix.

Ogilvy 360 performed wonderfully during the recruitment phase. Voices of the Olympic Games ended up hosting 101 athlete blogs, representing 31 sports and 25 countries. Although this is a minimal sample of what goes on during the games it was, in my humble opinion, a very nice mix that portrayed their fellow athletes quite well.

Since the program was about hearing the Voices of this guys, recruitment was the key element.

I must admit that the idea of opening up and putting lenovo’s brand behind people we didn’t know raised some eyebrows here and there.

Now that the thing is over I’m delighted to say that what this athletes wrote about, the way they shared the good the bad and the ugly, the sheer openness and honesty did not cease to amaze me every single day during those fantastic two weeks.

They were sports heroes, now they became my personal marketing heroes.

One Idea. Endless access points.

PC at the iLounge featuring the "voices" site. Courtesy of Ogilvy 360

The idea itself was quite simple: enabling athlete blogging. After getting the right mix of athletes we needed to ensure that their words traveled far and quick.

The site and the way it was thought was just a channel, a place where feeds came in and went out to the various distribution services that orbited around the program. Simply put: athlete posts feeds were aggregated at the voices site and then redistributed as aggregated RSS feeds that powered Facebook Apps, Mobile Phone devices and anything anyone wanted to do with the outcome.

One example of this was what Mark Cahill did for Cycling.com; where he took advantage of the RSS filters we put in place to show only those posts written by Cyclists.

All of that was enabled with the help of Yahoo Pipes and quite a bit of programming on the Voices site.

Lessons learned

Too much happened over the past 9 months. Tons of ideas, reduced turnaround times, pressure, just to name a few. Here’s the list of things I’ve learnt:

• Ideas will flow like rivers, it is execution that matters
• One must learn to focus and discard things quickly
• Anything can be done
• Outsourced stuff does not always work as it should
• Distributed content is the future
• Days can span longer than 24 hours. They can also last a lot less.
• I love chaos. I might rant, but I’d rather be underwater and crazy than doing business as usual.
• I am fortunate to work where I do and, particularly with the people I work with.

I know I left a ton of stuff out, maybe for another post. (Not likely to happen)

(Disclaimer: I have not posted results, targets adn the like because I’m sure David is going to take care of that).

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