Every four years, for 16 days, the world’s greatest athletes try to live up to the Olympic motto: faster, higher, stronger. But as athletes prepare to run, jump, lift, and swim their way to glory, a number of Olympic organizers were living by a different creed: faster, richer, dirtier. Rocked in recent months by a bribery scandal, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has, in its advertising, set its focus on athletic achievement and international brotherhood.
"Celebrate Humanity," a worldwide campaign by TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, broke last week. Creative directors were Lee Clow and Rob Siltanen. Siltanen and fellow TBWA/Chiat/Day staffer Pam Keehn have since departed the agency to partner in a new Los Angeles ad shop, Siltanen/Keehn Advertising.
At the center of the campaign are six TV spots that were assembled by TBWA/Chiat/Day’s in-house division, Venice Beach Editorial. Some of the Olympic heroes in the spots are familiar: Jesse Owens, Wilma Rudolph, Muhammad Ali. Yet the work mostly features athletes who aren’t sports legends, but competitors celebrating their personal bests. Maggie Silverman, the agency’s worldwide account director on the IOC business, said that "Celebrate Humanity" is a way to promote the spirit of the Olympic movement. "We did a lot of research, as did the IOC, and one of the things we found was that people can separate management of the Games from the Games themselves," she said.
The agency pitch process came after months of allegations that IOC members had accepted bribes—in the form of cash, scholarships, and jobs—from local organizing committees hoping to bring the Games to their cities. Most of the news coverage focused on the manner in which Salt Lake City’s committee, which will host the 2002 Winter Games, won its Olympic bid; but the scandal has tainted other past and future Olympic sites.
"People have asked, ‘How could this scandal not have affected you?’" said Silverman. "But the only real way it affected us was this: We’d gotten to know the history of the Games so well, and learned how much it has done for world peace, that seeing the Olympics in jeopardy—seeing it under attack—made us even more determined to pre-
serve and protect it."
All Olympics footage is owned by the IOC and maintained by the Olympic Television Archive Bureau (OTAB). Editor Dan Bootzin of Venice Beach Editorial teamed with agency creatives and Susan Nickerson of Nickerson Research, Los Angeles, to put together clips from films by Bud Greenspan, the Games’ official documentarian since ’84, as well as from Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary about the ’36 Olympics; Tokyo Olympiad, which chronicled the ’64 Summer Games; and Visions of Eight, which covered the ’72 Olympics in Munich.
Bootzin, who cut all six "Celebrate Humanity" spots, is a lifelong sports fan who grew up watching the Olympics on television. "TV coverage is by nature nationalistic," said Bootzin. "The battle was to keep the clips as international as possible." Working from scripts by the account’s two creative directors, as well as copywriters Dan Mountain and Mark Reichard, Bootzin found a wealth of footage to illustrate the desired Olympic themes. "There are great little stories hidden behind the big ones," observed Bootzin.
One of those stories belongs to British sprinter Derek Redmond, whose bid for a medal at the ’92 Barcelona Games ended when he tore a hamstring muscle during the race. "Courage" depicts Redmond’s agony, followed by his struggle to walk across the finish line. The spot’s accompanying voiceover, written by Siltanen and read by actor Robin Williams, says, "Strength is measured in pounds. Speed is measured in seconds. Courage? You can’t measure courage."
Three spots—"Giant," "Rhymes" and "Opponent"—are stirring montages of Olympic history that present famous athletes like Owens, Ali, and Greg Lougainis as well as competitors in fencing, soccer, and lacrosse. "Rhymes," which shows opening and closing ceremonies, has a voiceover which says in a Dr. Seuss-like meter: "They all wave goodbye/They hug and they kiss/And you think that maybe, just maybe, it could all be like this."
"Silver," written by Siltanen, contains no cuts—just a single, slow-motion shot of a Bulgarian weightlifter named Yoto Yotov, who solemnly hoists a huge burden above his head, lets it drop, then literally jumps for joy. Yotov, the supered title reveals, won a silver medal in Barcelona. In a sly retort to a ’96 Nike ad by Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore., the voiceover says, "Someone once said if you don’t win the silver, you lose the gold. Obviously, they never won the silver."
Though TBWA/Chiat/Day made an effort to showcase foreign athletes, Bootzin said some well-known American triumphs were too irresistible to leave out. A montage spot ends with a shot of gymnast Kerri Strug, whose final, ankle-twising vault at the ’96 Olympics in Atlanta helped the American squad win a gold medal.
The search for perfect bits of historical footage took TBWA/ Chiat/Day producer Anh Thu Le and art director Craig Tanimoto to the OTAB facility in London, which maintains the film and video master versions of all Olympic coverage. The challenge was to match the sharp video images from recent games to the softer-looking film footage from the ’60s and ’70s, to the black-and-white newsreel footage from the ’30s. "Not all of it looked great," said Bootzin. "If it was washed out, we tried to make it look nice, but for the most part, the older stuff was left alone. These images are lodged in people’s memories because of television, and we didn’t want to mess with that."
