An Olympic athlete doesn’t have to win a gold medal to make an indelible impression on viewers around the world. The International Olympic Committee’s "Celebrate Humanity" campaign reminds us of that fact—and gears up for the 2002 Winter Games, to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah—with footage of Olympic heroes winning, losing and playing the game in particularly memorable ways.
Created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, and director/editor Dan Bootzin of Venice Beach Editorial, the in-house editing arm of the agency, the eight spots range from "Bobsled," which features the tenacious (but not medal-winning) Jamaican bobsled team, to "Smile," in which famous and lesser known Olympic athletes show their happiness on camera.
For the agency team and editor, compiling the images for the ads was quite an Olympian task. "I’ve worked on a lot of commercials and on some, you might have fifty thousand feet of film. This was around ten times that amount," relates Bootzin. "We had to go through literally hundreds of thousands of hours of footage—every Olympics for as long as the Olympics have been recorded. It was amazingly daunting."
Nonetheless, the agency team never considered any other approach. TBWA/Chiat/Day landed the IOC account in July 1999. The agency created a similar, stock footage-based campaign for the 2000 Summer Olympics, held in Sydney, Australia. "[That] was the first time the IOC had done advertising and they felt the need to reflect upon what the Olympic ideals are," says art director Chuck Monn. "It was important for us not to get in the way of that. We felt it could get really ‘advertisy’ if we started trying to create too much."
Copywriter Jeff Maki agrees: "It’s more pure and, I think, more inspiring to see the actual footage."
Rather than simply showing film of famous athletes winning races or accepting gold medals, the creatives opted for a more humanistic take. "The Hermannator," for instance, shows footage of Austrian skier’s Hermann Maier’s horrific fall during the ’98 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, as a voiceover says, "Falling is easy. Getting back up—that’s the hard part." At the end of the spot, titles reveal that Maier went on to win two gold medals. "The great thing about the Olympics is that it’s not about the winning and losing," Monn relates. "It’s about people coming together, and the fact that they’re trying."
On The Hunt
For both the Sydney Olympics campaign and the new Salt Lake City package, the creatives gleaned their material from one source: The Olympic Television Archive Bureau (OTAB) in London. "It’s wonderful because the people there are so knowledgeable," says agency producer Anh-Thu Le. "They have historians there who were able to help us so much in finding the right footage."
Le, who had previously worked with Bootzin on a Nissan campaign, says he was her first choice to edit the spots. "He’s got such a wonderful eye and he’s great with music," she explains. "It was a very collaborative effort, and Dan is a creative editor."
What’s more, Bootzin edited the "Think Different" campaign that the agency created for Apple Computers. "That was similar in that it was culling through thousands of hours of footage, looking for that one perfect moment," says Bootzin of the spots, which featured shots of free thinkers throughout the ages. "You didn’t know exactly what you were looking for, but you would know it when you saw it."
After screening OTAB’s extensive collection, Le and the creative team brought hundreds of hours of footage back to Los Angeles, where, together with Bootzin, they began the task of choosing those perfect Olympic moments. "In a few cases, you might have a script for a spot," Bootzin recalls. "Maybe in the margin of the script, you’d write down some [shot] ideas. But you didn’t really know. It might end up that a totally different shot would be right. There was just so much material."
Sometimes, scripts were written around exceptional footage, such as the intense close-up of Japanese ski jumper Harada Mashahiko that inspired "Ski Jump." "We looked at so many ski jumps, but we never found another shot where it zoomed in on the guy’s face like that," Bootzin says. "It was such an amazing shot that it became its own spot."
More often, Bootzin and the creatives were forced to abandon favorite script ideas because the right footage just wasn’t available. "We’d remember an event and spend two days looking for it and then we’d find it," the editor says. "Maybe it was a great moment historically, but it would be a terrible shot."
As an example, Bootzin refers to legendary skier Franz Klammer, who made quite an impression at the ’76 Winter Games. "As we were cutting this [campaign], that name kept coming up," Bootzin reports. "People from the IOC and people internally kept saying ‘Let’s use Franz Klammer.’ Well, we searched through every shot of [Klammer] and not one of them worked. The camera was too far away. You couldn’t really tell it was him, and it didn’t look that spectacular. It wasn’t that it was poorly filmed. It just wasn’t covered to be a three-second shot in a commercial."
The multiple cameras involved in Olympic coverage often posed some challenges because what works well for broadcast sporting events does not always work as well as a spot. "What we’d find—and this was incredibly frustrating—there’d be a moment that would begin to happen, and they would cut to another camera angle," says Bootzin. "You could see it, just starting, and then it would be lost forever."
Compiling footage for the winter campaign proved a bit more difficult than Sydney. "The summer Olympics get more viewership, and it seems people are more aware of the great long distance runners and one-hundred meter guys," Maki explains. "There’s a lot more publicity. With the winter campaign we had to dig a little harder."
And, as Bootzin notes, winter athletes are less physically exposed. "We started to realize that, except for the ice skaters, everyone had goggles and helmets," he notes. "When you can’t see someone’s facial expression, it’s harder to get that emotional impact."
One of the most challenging spots to assemble was "Smile." "To work, ‘Smile’ needed big close-ups, and people relating to the camera," explains Bootzin. "[Olympic] television footage is not shot real tight. You get a lot of shots of people walking by, looking off or waving to the camera, but that sort of portraiture, that connecting to the camera isn’t usually done. We would call OTAB in London daily and ask for footage, and I don’t think we realized until we went out there ourselves how hard it was. We’d say, ‘Give us some smiles. It would be really nice too, if they could lift their goggles and look right into the camera.’ Everyone would do the best they could to go through and find these moments, but it was really difficult."
Difficult as the entire process was, the team enjoyed it. "It was nice for us because it gave us a chance to relive all of those great Olympic moments," Le says. "Moments like the ones in ‘Bobsled’ and ‘Hermannator’ stand out because they encompass people’s hopes and dreams. Not just for the athletes but for the viewers as well. All of us who were watching felt it."
"It’s inspiring," Monn concurs. "There is so much history and passion within the Olympics. It’s an amazing account to work on."
