Bravery Unbound: The Sage Invictus Games Sponsorship (2018)

How do you celebrate the successes of war veterans-turned-athletes at their annual olympic-style games without diminishing the emotional scarred journey they have traveled?

As one of the original sponsors of Prince Harry’s Invictus Games, we were regularly tasked with developing an annual advertising campaign to promote the games and our sponsorship. In 2018, when the games were held in Sydney, our sponsorship program was tied to a launch of the Sage Australia cloud accounting product. Our mission was to drive awareness of our sponsorship and traffic to the regional corporate website promoting the new cloud products.

We met with participating athletes ahead of the games to develop authentic stories and photography. As we got to know these heroes, it became clear our executional challenge was two-fold: show their current physical successes as athletes while also capturing the emotional road they traveled as veterans of war. Since our primary canvas would be hundreds of OOH units, we decided to go big with highly impactful graphic executions. It would be a visually arresting campaign for the 2018 Invictus Games, celebrating these veteran’s journey.

We accomplished this with a campaign tagline “Bravery Unbound”, and a double-exposure graphic approach that expressed each athletes’ unique inner story. With bold primary colors layered atop traditional 4-color portraits set against stark black, these gorgeous images came to life at Sydney International Airport’s arrival halls, on Sydney’s transit, on billboards surrounding the stadium and then most vividly at opening night ceremonies in a stunning centerpiece video. Additionally, the visual approach was used online, tied to the local product launch communications as well as in the regional website.

OUTCOME: With a media plan of $500K over four weeks, the “Bravery Unbound” campaign generated a 30% uptick in website impressions, a 65% increase in total leads, a 44% increase in marketing qualified leads, and a 225% increase in incremental pipeline value.