Following the Canadian Olympic Committee and Canadian Paralympic Committee decision to become the first teams to announce they wouldn’t send teams to the Tokyo Games this summer – which was rapidly followed by their Australian equivalents and then by the IOC’s decision to push back the Games to 2021, sponsor RBC launched a supportive commercial called ‘We Are All Team Canada’.
The objective was to offer a message of support to Canadian athletes and to unify the whole nation amidst the coronavirus pandemic.
The creative, which focuses on the sacrifices Canadian athletes are prepared to make, was posted across the bank’s social platforms in both English and French versions.
Alongside footage of athletes training, the spot states: “As a Canadian Olympic athlete, you’ve trained and sacrificed all your life with one goal in mind. And now you’ve had to put your greatest dream on hold until athletes can compete safely once again.”
RBC has been involved with the Canadian Olympic Movement since 1947 and is the longest-standing corporate supporter of Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic teams.
Its backing in recent times has also included being a National Partner of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games, a presenting partner of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Torch Relays and supported the Canadian Olympic Team through the Sochi 2014 and Rio 2016 Olympic Games.
RBC also supports amateur sport in Canada from playground to podium by helping in the development of athletes who compete at home and abroad, providing elite-level amateur athletes with flexible career experiences to complement their training regimes through the RBC Olympians program.
Comment:
This campaign seeks to further strengthen Team Canada’s national identity and unity building stance.
After all, when it came to the Tokyo 2020 postponement decision, Team Canada led the way with a motivating and influential pre-emptive move by its Olympic and Paralympic representatives.
The stance and firm decision-making ensured that the Olympic and Paralympic brands acted as moral leaders filling a vacuum and as brand marketers prepared to back their values.
The organisation’s brand partners are certainly publicly supportive of the action: despite what the balance sheets might look like at the moment and the fact that so many sponsors have already filmed and photographed their Olympic campaigns.
Swimmer Aurelie Rivard, a five-time Paralympic medallist who had a commercial shoot for Gatorade scheduled during the week the decision was made and which was subsequently temporarily shelved received a nice note from Gatorade saying “Hey, we’re behind you 100 per cent, we’re going to figure this out.”
Sponsors in Canada and around the world now need to make decisions about whether to completely shelve existing plans, strategies and campaigns already in the can, or whether to rework existing content with a fresh spin and roll it out with a different schedule.
Links:
RBC
https://www.instagram.com/rbc/
https://www.youtube.com/user/RBC
https://www.linkedin.com/company/rbc/
Canadian Olympic Committee
https://www.instagram.com/teamcanada/
https://www.youtube.com/teamcanada
https://twitter.com/teamcanada
https://www.facebook.com/teamcanada
Canadian Paralympic Committee
https://www.youtube.com/user/CDNParalympics
https://www.instagram.com/cdnparalympics/?hl=en
https://twitter.com/CDNParalympique
https://www.facebook.com/CDNParalympics
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