Electric Ireland's sponsorship activity for the Rio Olympics will go beyond physical fitness to highlight the "innate mental strength" required to be an elite athlete, says head of marketing Lisa Browne.
The #ThePowerWithin campaign will build on the company's first Team Ireland sponsorship in 2012, when the Electric Ireland brand was only one year old and the sponsorship was "about getting people used to it".
Road to Rio
Once again, Electric Ireland will focus on sharing athletes' "road to Rio" stories, featuring tales of resilience, the ability to overcome failure and the fight to get as far as the flight to Brazil. Medals are not required for the sponsorship to succeed, Browne says.
“Our story for Rio, like our story for London, is very much the story of the athletes getting on to the plane. Everything after that is a bonus.”
After an internal launch last week, the company's activity steps up from Monday, when its Team Ireland stings will begin on RTÉ. The campaign, which has a "relatively modest" budget, will cut across television, press, radio, out-of- home and digital, with the latter element encompassing platforms such as Spotify that were not on Irish advertisers' radar four years ago.
“The world has changed enormously in those four years, even digital and social media is just huge now in 2016 compared to 2012 – and it was already big then,” says Browne.
As part of the sponsorship, Electric Ireland has also organised media training for athletes that includes advice on how to manage their reputations on social media.
Cawley Nea TBA is Electric Ireland’s creative agency, while the campaign has PR support from WHPR and Thinkhouse. RTÉ has produced its sponsorship stings in-house, while, as with 2012, the campaign features “iconic” athlete photography by Sportsfile.
The risk of residual taint from the spate of international athletics drug scandals does not overly worry Electric Ireland.
“We would always be cognizant of any effect of that on our brand, but we just concentrate on the individual Irish athletes,” Browne says.
Piggybacking
Perhaps due to the International Olympic Committee’s gimlet-eyed watch over the Olympics brand, Electric Ireland did not suffer last time out from the spectacle of other companies piggybacking on Olympic goodwill without an official sponsorship in place.
“We didn’t experience any of that in London,” says Browne. The greater challenge is “how to cut through” the general marketing noise and “cluttered” sponsorship space.
Rower Sinéad Jennings, pentathlete Natalya Coyle, golfer Paul McGinley and "of course" Katie Taylor are among the athletes who will feature in its campaign activity between now and the opening ceremony in Rio on August 5th, while the qualification of the Irish men's hockey team happily adds a team dimension to the sponsorship messages this time around.
