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July 28, 2003 - Strategy Magazine
Special Report: Top Clients 2003

Top Client, Lobby Group: Vancouver 2010 Bid Corporation
Going for gold
How a multi-channel, multi-pronged marketing campaign begat Vancouver 2010

by Terry Poulton
page 24

A tiny girl in quaint Czech garb totters across a stage in Prague. The silence is eerie in the steamy ballroom as a thousand eyes glom on to the cushion she's carrying. On it is an envelope containing the name of the city that will host the Winter Olympics in 2010.

Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, rips open the envelope and announces which of the finalists has won. It's not Salzburg, Austria, and it's not Pyeongchang, South Korea. It's Vancouver, British Columbia.

The crowd goes wild, especially the 100-strong Canadian contingent in their white shirts, red ties and dark suits with good-luck loonies in the pockets.

"Oh my God, we're going home with what we came for!" That's how Andrea Shaw, VP of communications for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Bid Corporation, says she and everyone else on her team felt on July 2.

Composed of representatives from governments and the First Nations, community interest organizations, sports groups and business leaders, the Bid Corp worked flat out for three years to ensure that its "Sea-to-Sky Games" would beat out the six other original candidates.

By all accounts, the winning formula wasn't just the West Coast's rich natural assets as a winter venue, the strategic use of homegrown Olympic champs as lobbyists and a budget of $35 million. It was also a synergy between the Bid Corp and its marketing partners that combined cunning ingenuity, fancy footwork, astonishing stamina and team spirit worthy of the winningest athletes in the world.

Together, Shaw and VP marketing Linda Oglov, oversaw a massive, multi-pronged marketing effort on an international scale. At its peak, the Bid Corp included 18 full-time, part-time and contract staffers in the marketing and communications teams.

Neeta Soni was the Bid Corp's director of marketing, working to produce large-scale marketing campaigns on behalf of top sponsors, such as Molson, leading up to the bid - no easy task either. "At that time, we weren't an event. We were a concept - we were a dream to host the games."

For achieving one electrifying moment and making Canada victorious - especially at a time when our catastrophe-battered country urgently needs international acclaim - Strategy names the Vancouver Bid Corp Top Client in the Lobby Group category.

"There's no shortage of sports analogies for this story," says Dave Martin, managing director and chief creative officer at TBWA/Vancouver, which was the Bid Corp's AOR. "But the one that really nails it for us, because we only had 20 months, is that it was a marathon done at the speed of a sprint.

"Fortunately, we found our voice early and expressed it in the campaign line, 'It's our time to shine' - meaning, let's bring out our best of everything, not just athletes, and win or lose, we'll show the world what we can do."

Adds Shaw: "We decided to differentiate Canada from the competition by [portraying it as] exactly what we are: a very young, very forward-looking country with incredible geography, cultural diversity and fair-play values [plus] a sophisticated urban centre right on the Pacific Ocean and a world-class alpine resort [Whistler] nearby. Then we never wavered from that theme."

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