How SK-II drove over 1 billion views to their first Olympic Games brand campaign
As brands continue to make it their mission to embed themselves into culture, one of the biggest hurdles they face is cultivating permission to be heard. This challenge is magnified when attempting to tap into events as large and culturally important as the Olympic Games.
In this episode, YoeGin Chang and Delphine Buttin, brand directors at SK-II, unpack how they collaborated with Nihar Das, founder of WPP Black Ops, and Siddika Dehlvi, global business lead at WPP Black Ops, to carve out SK-II’s place as an Olympic Games partner, bringing the stories of some of the world’s top athletes together in an anthology and launching them, not as an ad campaign, but as a film premiere on YouTube. Here are some of the lessons they learned along the way.
1. Put the right people in the room
Ask any creative person what they love about their job, and one of the top answers will be: Every brief is different. And if every brief is different, agencies need a diverse pool of talent to tackle each one. That’s the philosophy behind WPP’s Black Ops, an initiative designed to tackle multidisciplinary creative challenges.
“We handpicked people from different disciplines and companies inside WPP,” Das explains. “We put together a team to solve a problem and, once we solve it, we dismantle the team and move on to the next problem.”
To rise to the challenge of SK-II’s Olympic opportunity, WPP Black Ops knew it would need a broad skill set. Forming a team specifically for the brief meant catering to all the campaign’s requirements without the constraints of a traditional agency model.
2. The best stories to tell already exist
Having your talent secured is a great starting point, but deciding what to do with it can be one of the most daunting parts of the creative process. But WPP Black Ops found inspiration in the life stories of its talent.
“Each of them had a beautiful back story,” explains Dehlvi. “It wasn’t a story we crafted and took to the athletes. It’s a real human story we discovered in each athlete’s life.” adds Das.
Extracting the narrative from the character instead of the other way around proved to be more beneficial as a concept, and also created a more authentic connection with audiences, as each story was based in a human truth.
3. Create where culture is happening
The challenge when attempting to create cultural impact is that no idea can be strong enough based on its message alone; it needs to be scaled to large audiences to realize real impact.
When defining the criteria for where each idea should come to life, Das explains, “We needed democratic access, binge viewing ... and the fact we wanted to take it to billions of people made YouTube the single choice.”
To play a role in a monumental event like the Olympic Games, SK-II knew it needed the right platform, where its audience was actively consuming content. YouTube not only delivered scale, but it became the glue that combined branded content, the Olympic Games, and the audience all in one place.
Having something to say and saying it loud enough will always be a challenge when it comes to sponsorship of global events. But as SK-II and WPP Black Ops discovered, if you base your stories in human truth and give those stories a world stage, the creative impact may just #ChangeDestiny.
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