BBC Winter Olympics Trailer is Forged in Fire

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The BBC’s trailers for its sports coverage, put together by its BBC Creative in-house team, are unmatched in terms of craft. Each of them is an effort to innovate in and showcase animation techniques, like the trailer for their FIFA World Cup coverage in 2018 which involved hundreds of hand-embroidered frames animated into a unique visual experience.

But in 2026, traditional animation faces existential questions, with more and more adverts turning to AI to enhance or take over the process. For commercial brands, some of these AI Ads, like Coke’s 2025 Christmas campaign, have been extremely strong performers on Test Your Ad. Others, like some recent Super Bowl ads in the US, have been relative flops.

For their Winter Olympics coverage, BBC Creative kept faith with hand-crafted animation to produce their most spectacular and technically difficult trailer yet. Running with the theme of “Trailblazers”, they turned the word into a literal pyrotechnic display with skiers, snowboarders and skaters blazing a path of fire through a snowy alpine landscape. All the fire in the ad is real, and all the animated figures were 3-D printed before being set ablaze and filmed, for 45 seconds of stunning animation which also forms the title sequence of every Winter Olympics segment.

Set to stirring Italian choral music, the ad has a simplicity that may conceal the amount of work that went into it. But it’s still very effective for the viewer, scoring a very good 3.6 Stars on Test Your Ad, well over the 2.7-Star average for a TV or Streaming service commercial, with the moment-by-moment emotional trace showing the peak of audience happiness comes with the reveal of the BBC logo and the Olympic Rings.

For a Public Service Broadcaster like the BBC, you might argue advertising doesn’t matter a great deal – it’s an official Olympics partner and so will be showing the sport anyway, and the rest of the media will be covering the Games in depth. Why make a trailer at all? Of course the BBC wants to create distinctive and memorable branding for its coverage and ensure high viewing figures to justify the cost of its partnership.

But there’s a longer-term element at play too. The BBC is a brand like any other, and by making highly emotional, effective trailers like this one, the broadcaster helps create long-term positive impressions in an increasingly fierce and competitive broadcast market. It’s investing in British animation talent and doing what nobody has done on screen before – and if it’s emotionally effective too, those strategies have more chance of making an impact.