I’m very pleased to see it out in the world! It was a tricky one, with lots of “moving parts”. In March 2024, I was brought on board for a three-month stint with my good friends at McCann in Germany, to conceptualise and write a TVC campaign (with OOH/KV elements) for Alibaba.com and their official partner sponsorship of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
The campaign featured sports-stars-turned-entrepreneurs, including NBA legend Tony Parker, as well as former tennis star Simona Galik Moore, and mountain-bike icon Elias Schwarzler.
TVCs:
It took a lot of work, getting this over the line, thanks to a particularly hefty laundry list of unique considerations and client mandatories to bring into harmony, all in just 15″ of screen time (with 10″ and 6″ cutdown versions which also had to make sense).
Key Visuals / OOH
Portrait version/cutdown for social video:
Some of the campaign’s unique challenges and considerations:
- Communicating to a retail/consumer audience that Alibaba.com is a B2B platform
- Communicating the services and benefits they offer
- Communicating their role as an official Olympic sponsor
- Communicating that Alibaba’s sponsored athletes are both sports stars as well as successful business owners
- Compliance with the official Olympic Committee’s stringent messaging rules and sign-off of all scripts prior to production (for one example, any mention of or even allusion to “winning” is against the official Olympic Spirit, among many other examples)
- Cultural considerations, working for clients in China, with a German agency, making English-language ads for a Western audience
- Considerable time pressure, with non-negotiable shoot dates and sponsored athlete availability windows
It was quite a process. By the end, I had conceptualised and written no less than 32 different conceptual routes, with scripts to demonstrate. In many cases, requiring three iterations of each, to demonstrate the ideas’ application to multiple ambassador athletes.
We had a great team, though, and we were up for the challenge! The excellent gang at McCann Germany worked tirelessly to make the process as smooth, efficient and streamlined as possible, resulting in a deadline met without any hiccups, a happy client, and a campaign I’m proud to have created for one of world’s sport’s biggest stages. It was also very cool to work with an NBA legend like Tony Parker.
Thank you, McCann DE!
Client: Alibaba.com
Agency: McCann Germany
Senior Conceptual Copywriter: Gord Laws
Senior Art Director: Guto Kono
ECD: Donovan Bryan
Account Exec: Jan Wilhelm
Production: Norman Henkel