With the Paris 2024 Olympics officially wrapped, Mediaweek is capping off our CMOlympics series. Throughout the Summer Games, we’ve caught up with the standout brand partners powering the Games to hear first-hand from their marketing guns about running campaigns on the world’s biggest sporting stage.
Today, we’re with Andrew Hicks, chief marketing officer of Woolworths Group – an Australian Olympic and Paralympic Team partner and Nine Olympics broadcast partner.
What does being an Olympics and Paralympics partner mean for Woolworths?
Since Rio de Janeiro in 2016, Woolworths has been the fresh food partner of the Australian Olympic and Paralympic teams. As a proud Australian brand, it’s a role we are honoured to play, and we are excited to stand alongside our talented athletes once again for Paris 2024.
It’s more than just a sponsorship. It’s about supporting the health and wellbeing of all Australians by showcasing the incredible fresh food that Australia has on offer and its power to help fuel the dreams of our incredible athletes.
The Games are not just about physical excellence and mental fortitude but also camaraderie, team spirit, unity, optimism, and pride. These are characteristics we not only want to associate with the Woolworths brand but are at the heart of the brand at its best – often exemplified by the over 180,000 team members we have working together across our Group to serve our customers.
Walk us through your campaign for the Olympics and Paralympics. What are the key elements and what inspired the creative direction?
The Olympics and Paralympic Games are a time when we come together to celebrate our national pride and proudly support our incredible Australian team. It’s a time for optimism, growth, and togetherness. We wanted our campaign to reflect these values, values that the Woolworths Group also upholds as we believe we are “better together”.
Our Olympics and Paralympic athletes you will see in our creative are individuals, but they are also part of something bigger. A supportive family, a community that encourages a healthy, active life, a sporting environment where effort matters and role models are abundant, and a nation that inspires big dreams along with big opportunity. We wanted the campaign to capture all of this whilst showing that fresh, healthy, nutritious food plays a key role in being your best. Fresh fuels the best in all of us is the campaign distillation of that sentiment.
When the creative team discovered Paralympian Col Pearse’s story of training for the Tokyo Paralympics in his family’s dairy farm dam, they were genuinely excited! We wanted to share his remarkable and humble story about hard work, resilience and family support along with healthy eating habits and built the campaign from there. It became the centrepiece of our TVC creative. We saw the Woolworths brand as the enabler, not the hero. It was about others, not us.
Col Pearse filming the ‘Fresh fuels the best in all of us’ TVC
Col Pearse and family at the ‘Pearse Aquatic Centre’ dairy farm dam
The integrated multi-channel campaign launched on free to air TV on 10 July, accompanied by our athlete ambassadors with fresh food creative across in-store, social, digital, and out of home.
Outside of the marketing assets, we extended the campaign to include bespoke limited-edition food products and a strong fundraising element to help celebrate and support our Olympians and Paralympians. This included a green and gold bakery range including cupcakes, donuts, and a soccer ball smash cake, to $3 gold, $2 silver and $1 bronze token donations to support Paralympics Australia.
Soccer ball smash cake
We are really proud that with our customers’ support, we have been able to raise over $730,000 so far. We also launched, in partnership with the Mint, a limited edition two dollar coin celebrating the Olympics and Paralympics that customers can receive in change when paying in cash.
Green and gold cupcakes
It’s been such a great event and creative platform to be expansive across all aspects of marketing, product, community, trade activation and more. Like the Games themselves, it’s brought the best out of all of us as we strive to excite our customers and answer their needs.
What objectives did you set out to achieve with this campaign?
We wanted to demonstrate our belief that quality food, with Australian fresh at the heart, fuels the performance of both world-class athletes, and healthy everyday Australians. And in doing so, celebrate our diverse Australian athletes and invigorate national pride and brand advocacy.
When you walk into our stores, you will not only see the athletes featured throughout the store with the fruit and veg that powers them, but you’ll also see our wonderful team celebrating our nation’s best in a variety of ways. Engaging our team to in turn engage with our customers is an important objective of this campaign.
And daily, we wanted to celebrate the achievements of our athletes in Paris, not just gold medal winning moments, but personal bests and people pushing themselves to make our country so proud.
What is the weighting of your media mix, and what has driven this decision?
Our media strategy for this campaign focuses on driving relevancy and impact across owned, earned, and paid media, with a clear role for each asset within the broader campaign. Paid media channels like TV, online video, cinema, and social media enable rich storytelling at scale with our brand film featuring Paralympian Col Pearse.
We’ve also strategically partnered with Nine, QMS and News Corp to leverage their Olympic partnerships and maximise campaign effectiveness. Our owned media channels, including our store network, website, and catalogue complement these efforts.
During the Olympic Games competition period, we have embraced our athletes’ performances in Paris through reactive and celebratory moments across OOH and through our paid and organic social channels. Our ambition was to celebrate in almost real time in an engaging manner. These reactive moments have also been captured on our front of store screen assets through our retail media business Cartology, which is something new and innovative for Woolworths.
We’ve had fantastic feedback from customers and our own team on how we’ve activated in our stores, which is a powerful medium in its own right. From the running tracks you see as soon as you enter the store, to athletes like break dancer Jeff Dunne, Rugby7’s Maurice Longbotton and wheelchair rugby’s Ryley Batt’s presence on point of sale in the fresh department. Our customers love a good pun and a smile, and so do we, so when we celebrated Olympic Swimmer Mollie O’Callaghan’s gold medal win, we couldn’t help ourselves to say “smashed it Mollie” with the image of Mollie and an avocado as goggles.
Is FTA TV coverage an important part of the campaign?
Event TV is something special, and having the live broadcast, combined with live streaming, and on-demand television give consumers a choice on what and when they want to watch, driving even deeper engagement.
This complements the digital activity we are undertaking across Nine, News Corp, Meta, TikTok, and our website, where customers see their heroes on the screen enjoying fresh Aussie food that fuels them to achieve their best.
What aspect of this campaign and partnership are you most proud of?
Our team has been especially proud of the agility of the dynamic digital creative we have been able to change on a daily basis to celebrate wins and personal bests of athletes overnight in Paris. Through a close collaborative partnership between media, creative, publishers, platform partners, and Cartology, we have been able to update creative daily to over 2,400 OOH sites and 1,000 Front of Store Screens, plus adapt creative to suit over 150 build size variations.
Our goal was to get as close to real time from an athlete winning to a congratulations from Woolworths – I think the team are challenging their “personal bests” in terms of pace. My personal favourite is swimmer Mollie O’Callaghan’s “Mollie, you smashed it” creative where we were lucky to have shot Mollie with avocados being used as goggles pre the Games.
I’m also incredibly proud of the Col Pearse brand TVC. It’s a uniquely Australian story and many of our customers and team have found it inspirational and moving. It’s so rewarding to see a story that deserves to be shared being told in a way befitting of that story – with humility, humanity, and charm.
We’re also very proud that this has been one of the most inclusive creative production processes for Woolworths. Working with Paralympics Australia, Bus Stop Films, Inclusivity Made as well as internal team members like Geoff Trappett, who is Woolworths Group’s disability inclusion lead and a former Australian Paralympian, we have been focussed throughout the creative development process to ensure we represent Paralympians and those with disability with authenticity.
How do you plan to build upon or expand this campaign moving forward?
Woolworths are proud fresh food partners of a number of Australian sports including netball, cricket and surfing. We partner deliberately with the community grassroots sporting programs as part of our commitment to building a generation of “Fresh Food Kids”. It aligns to our belief that fresh, healthy Australian grown food is at the heart of everyone performing at their personal best.
We have a role to play in supporting kids in learning the benefits of eating fresh, but we know it’s equally important they are active. Only one in four children are eating enough fruit and vegetables. By partnering with these sports codes, we can truly be a part of hundreds of thousands of kids healthy upbringing. This, along with programs like Free Fruit for Kids in our stores, has given away more than 100 million pieces of fruit in Australia since the program began.
How does this campaign align with your broader marketing strategy?
We have been known as The Fresh Food People for more than 30 years, and it was important that this brand platform underpinned our Olympics and Paralympics campaign. Fresh fuels the best in us is at the heart of everything we are doing for Paris 2024.
Fruit and vegetables are part of our wider Fresh Specials marketing, where we encourage Aussies to eat in season fresh food when it’s abundant, at its highest quality, and great value. You will notice that our in season fruit and veg like bananas, apples, oranges, broccoli, Hass avocados, and potatoes have been integrated into the Paris 2024 campaign because they are all in season at the moment.
Inspiring and enabling Australians to eat healthily is an enduring brand belief. So too is making a positive contribution to the broader communities we serve. This campaign is a highlight in a long term commitment to act on our supermarket’s purpose to “bring a little good to everyone every day”.
See also:
CMOlympics: Vin Naidoo on the power of Toyota’s ‘Team Everyone’
CMOlympics: Old El Paso’s Surini Perera on driving ‘good noise’
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Top image: Andrew Hicks