Discovery ‘Olympic Winter Games Warm Up’ / Discovery & Red Bee

With less than a month to go until the 2018 Winter Olympics kick off in PyeongChang, South Korea, businesses are starting to ramp up their advertising to create hype around the games and the role they will play in them. One of these companies is Discovery, which holds the exclusive pay TV rights to the games as part of a deal with the BBC. Discovery’s creative department worked in collaboration with creative agency Red Bee Media to create a series of quirky animated ads which hope to raise people’s interest around the winter sports event, driving them to the channel.

Discovery teamed up with ‘Dumb ways to die’ animator Julian Frost and animation studio Passion Pictures to create a series of five short films, entitled ‘Olympic Winter Games Warm Up’, which depict the relationship between two sisters in the run up to the games. One sister is a winter Olympics enthusiast voiced by comedian and actress Morgana Robinson, whilst the other, voiced by actress Beattie Edmondson, has a more apathetic outlook. Each simple, colourful spot starts and ends with a catchy, 8-bit video game style jingle, which sandwiches a short animated sketch between the two characters as they discuss various winter sports including the luge, bobsleigh and curling.

The humour in the spots comes in the dynamic between the two ‘chalk and cheese’ siblings, as the uneager sister becomes fed up with the excitable sister’s constant Olympic fun facts. The facts are actually of great interest to the viewer which help shine light on some of the strange quirks and traditions of a series of, sometimes confusing, winter sports, in turn making the games more accessible to even the anti-sports kind. Each film ends with on-screen text which encourages the viewer to find out more at Discovery’s Eurosport website and includes the PyeongChang 2018 Eurosport logo, whilst stating itself as the games’ official broadcaster. Designed to be shared online, the videos contribute to Discovery’s efforts to make this year’s games the first fully digital Olympic event.

Executive creative director at Discovery, Robin Garnett, said of the campaign, ‘We looked at a variety of ways in which to bring the upcoming Olympic Winter Games to the broadest audience possible especially non-sports aficionados across all platforms through humour, emotion and storytelling. The Olympic Winter Games Warm Ups are short, sweet and funny, intended for sharing in social. Each alludes to the extraordinary feats of endurance, strength and sheer danger involved in many winter sports, but in a witty and knowing way.’

The work was written by Hannah Ford at Red Bee and can be viewed in full here.