C’est Chic! BBC Animated Ad Does Sport in Style
BBC
Paris 2024 Olympic Games
Oh, l’amour! Paris is the city of love, and for these two weeks it’s also the epicentre of world sport, so the BBC have had the bright idea of promoting their Olympic Games coverage with a stylishly animated ad that’s all about love, and sport, and what makes us love sport.
The BBC’s track record in advertising their shows, channels and services is a solid one, and every few years they really will go for gold, creating a promo film that sparks joy in viewers and reinforces their venerable brand. With a big sporting event, their job isn’t just to promote the coverage but to create a unique visual experience that ties dozens of different sports together. From weightlifting to beach volleyball, the ad has to sum the Olympics up and put across what makes them so special.
The BBC and Nexus Studios have achieved this with some real Parisian flair, creating an elegant, visually distinctive ad with an epic sweep. The ad works through clever visual analogies and references, built to attract the all important attention of the Right Brain. A candlelit bath becomes an athlete’s ice bath, and then a surging waterway for canoeists; a couple rolling downhill in an embrace becomes two judoka grappling on the mat; and emotional heartbreak becomes sporting disaster. Quickly followed, of course, by sporting triumph, ensuring the ad ends on an emotional peak.
It’s an ad that captures the romance of the setting and of the Games themselves, and does so in a style that helps it cut through all the rest of the promotional work around Paris 2024. But how does it land with viewers?
The results are very good – the ad scores 4.4-Stars, a strong rating on the Test Your Ad platform, with high potential for brand growth. But the Olympic Games are a short term proposition – it’s now or never if you’re tuning in to the live coverage – so the critical metric this time is short-term Spike rating, which comes out as Exceptional thanks to the drama and intensity of the action on-screen.
What makes the ad work so well isn’t just the clever visual metaphors and transitions, it’s the depth of cultural references, to Paris itself, to the Olympics and to French culture, in the form of a classic Edith Piaf tune on the soundtrack. Cultural references are another surefire way to get the attention of the right brain and build long-term, positive memory structures. And for anyone who watched the spectacular opening ceremony on the Seine, this is an ad which creates some of the same magic.