A new perspective on Olympics brand advertising, the Oly Awards were an experiment to invite crowd participation with advertising in an Olympic city.

Vancouver (our home city) hosted the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Since the Olympic Games are a major advertising event we saw our unique perspective in Vancouver as an opportunity to connect with brands and advertising agencies and to build awareness around the services AdHack offers.

Process

We created the Olympic Ad Awards – The Oly Awards – to report on advertising, to analyze the leading campaigns and to celebrate the best in Olympics advertising.

To execute The Oly Awards, we used popular, simple and lightweight tools. To gather content we used crowdsourcing and organized public photo walks to gather venue and advertising content. In addition, we created:

a Flickr photo group to collect and showcase contributed content
an OlympicAdAwards.com contest website
a judging panel of top local ad personalities
public scorecards for a brand-by-brand review by judges of top official and unofficial brands’ Olympic ad campaigns
a live web video broadcast of The Oly Awards to announce the winners of Best Brand and Best Photographer

We published our whole process, the highlights and the lowlights of the process and accolades as well as criticism for advertising at the 2010 Olympics.

Results

The Oly Awards sparked conversations for AdHack with brands and agencies and led to $150,000+ of new business in 2010 with both Olympic sponsor brands and non-sponsor brands. In addition, 800+ people entered Olympic ad photos and video and we received coverage in trade publications AdWeek and Ad Age.