EVENT AT A GLANCE
	Objective: Outpace Nike Inc. in media coverage leading up to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Strategy: Capture media imagination and interest with a series of innovative launch events that blends technology, storytelling, and testimonials. Tactics: Saturate a global media cycle by holding four events in four cities over 48 hours; bring star swimmer Michael Phelps to all four events through holographic technology; extend the media coverage with trial events. Results: Earned $25 million worth of global media coverage in the first week, and 9,000 Google hits within one day of the launch.

ack in July, it’s unlikely that most Americans could have named an Olympic swimmer. But now, after Michael Phelps’ performance in Beijing and his eight gold medals he is on the tip of millions of tongues worldwide. The guy’s Q-sport score — his familiarity and appeal as a sporting figure — must be heading off the charts faster than he can kick out a 100-meter fly.

That’s good news for competition-swimwear manufacturer Speedo International. Phelps is one of the company’s more than 35 signed athletes worldwide, ensuring that whenever he hits the pool to casually set another world record, he does so in a Speedo suit.

Problem is, swimming, and a superstar like Phelps, really only hit the broader public awareness during the Summer Olympics — that is, for about 16 days once every four years. Beyond those glory days in the global spotlight, swimming, swimmers, and the brands they tout are rarely in the headlines.

So for a swimwear-specific brand like Speedo, those critical two weeks are about more than the races in the pool. They’re also about the out-of-the-pool race to capture the attention of weekend athletes — those who see Phelps shave seconds off his personal bests while wearing a particular brand and think, “Hey, maybe I could bang out a few fast lengths without feeling like I’m going to throw up if I wore a suit like that, too. London 2012, here I come!” Athlete endorsements are powerful stuff.

That’s why Speedo competitor Nike Inc. would seem to have a major advantage. The behemoth company’s iconic all-sport logo is everywhere, all the time. The swoosh graces household names like Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, and Derek Jeter, and even some of Phelps’ fellow Team USA swimmers, including gold-medal-winning relay teammates Cullen Jones and Jason Lezak.

All told, Nike’s endorsement and sponsorship obligation for individual athletes, sports teams, and leagues totals $3.37 billion, according to the company’s quarterly securities filing issued in late February 2008. Those are some deep pockets.

With the Olympic opportunity looming and the Nike swoosh expected to appear on athletes throughout the games — not to mention the several Team USA swimmers who were contracted to Nike Swim and expected to wear Nike gear in the water — Speedo USA vice president of marketing Craig Brommers knew he needed to get off the blocks fast and take an early lead in the race for media coverage. “I wanted to stake claims to a technology story very early in this Olympic cycle,” Brommers says. “We’re up against brands that have a few more zeros in their budgets than I do, and we wanted to own the story.”

Brommers needed to spark some global media excitement and get Speedo in the headlines before Nike, with its powerful advertising and general omnipresence, turned Beijing into yet another swoosh-laden NikeTown.

Suitable News

Paddle back to January 2008, seven months before Beijing’s August opening ceremony. Speedo was getting ready to roll out a new suit model. High on the ho-hum scale, right?

Luckily for Brommers, this was not just another swimsuit. After three years of work by its AquaLab research-and-development group, Speedo’s new competition suit, the LZR Racer, was finally ready for prime time. Developed in conjunction with some unlikely partners — NASA engineers and fashion designer Rei Kawakubo of deconstructionist label Comme des Garçons — the suit blended the highest of high-tech materials with sleek aerodynamic principles and a touch of Asian mysticism to create something seemingly more profound than a couple of Lycra panels.

According to Speedo, the LZR Racer is bonded with ultrasonic welds making it seamless and reducing drag through the water. Special panels embedded in the base fabric compress the wearer’s body into a more streamlined shape, supporting it in the water and further reducing drag, which in swimming can mean the critical hundredths of a second between a podium place or a close-but-no-cigar finish. Calligraphy on the suit reads “kokoro,” which symbolizes heart, spirit, and mind. Phelps, who served as a consultant during the suit’s development, has said that when he is wearing the suit and hits the water, he feels “like a rocket,” adding, “This is going to take the sport of swimming to a new level.”

Brommers had his hook: the LZR Racer was much more than just a swimsuit. It was a sleek provocateur, designed by rocket scientists, Speedo’s top fluid-dynamics researchers, and a renegade couturier with a penchant for talismans. Claimed by one of the world’s fastest swimmers to make him even faster, the suit certainly had press appeal.

But to truly buy the story, the media would need to see the suit. A press release wouldn’t convey just how revolutionary Speedo — and its swimmers — expected this thing to be. Instead, the company turned to events: a strategy that has served Speedo well for many years. “We are not a traditional advertiser,” Brommers says. “We use much more of an event and PR model. Some of it is economics, and some of it is to cut through the clutter out there. We have a history over the past five to ten years of getting our message out in unique ways, using communications strategies instead of advertising for the bulk of our spend.”

In 2004, prior to the Athens games, Speedo gained a media edge with the New York launch for its Fastskin technology. Then, Speedo and its Los Angeles and New York-based partner Events in Motion (EIM), which has managed Speedo’s North American events for several years, conjured an X-Men vibe in a lab setting, complete with caterwaiters in lab coats, drinks served in test tubes, and images of swimmers sporting gills and fins. “We set the bar pretty high in ‘04, so we needed to surpass ourselves in ‘08,” Brommers says. “The one thing we learned is the appetite for these types of events is extremely high. Through the use of event communications, we were able to generate free media as opposed to paid media. Not easily, but the appetite was out there. People were excited to listen to it.” But would Speedo’s event-centric strategy work again?

Four Cities. 48 hours.

Brommers and Speedo marketers from other global regions devised a four-city launch-event strategy that would put the new suit on media radars worldwide. Events would take place in Sydney, the heart of Australia’s powerhouse swimming community; Tokyo, home to Kawakubo, a population of technology and fashion hounds, and men’s 100-meter breaststroke world-record-holder Kosuke Kitajima; London, near Speedo International’s Nottingham, UK-based corporate headquarters and site of the 2012 summer games; and finally New York, with its massive global-media concentration.

To truly dominate the headlines (and avoid stealing its own thunder in the age of Web 2.0), Speedo needed to saturate a complete media cycle. So the event team scheduled the launch events not as a road show that moved from city to city, but rather in quick succession across a period of about 48 hours. Given time-zone differences, the events could almost be called simultaneous.

Speedo scheduled champion swimmers from each of the host countries to appear at the events, giving reporters the important opportunity to hear straight from the athletes their comments about the suit’s benefits. But here was a challenge: how to get Phelps, Speedo’s (and, arguably swimming’s) marquee athlete, to appear at four events on four continents in just two days? The schedule would wreak havoc on any traveler, much less a world-class athlete training for his sport’s biggest competition. Yet Phelps’ presence, as the expected face of the 2008 Beijing games given his record-breaking quest for eight gold medals, was critical to gaining media attention and giving end-user credibility to Speedo’s claims of technical superiority.
Speedo turned to a holographic technology, Musion Eyeliner 3D, produced by London-based Dimensional Studios Ltd. “We really wanted it to feel like Michael was at all these launches,” Brommers says. “This technology is literally lifelike. We were the first sports brand to use it.” Rather than be on stage live at each event, Phelps’ holographic image would ensure he could virtually be in all four venues at once.

The Reveal

With the strategy set, Speedo’s PR teams, including staff from the New York office of sports-specialist firm Bremer Zwikel & Associates, created invite lists that reflected the suit’s cross-market story and appeal. That meant along with traditional sports, swimming, and mainstream media were fashion and lifestyle editors, science and innovation writers, arts editors, and trend spotters. Joining the media representatives were Speedo retail partners and key influencers in each market. Thanks to the suit’s unique provenance, print, TV, Web and blog editors, and reporters of all stripes could find a story hook. “Our target list included roughly 60 percent media, 20 percent retailers, and 20 percent influencers in each market,” Brommers explains. “For example, in New York, we invited MoMA curators. They’re definitely influencers in that community.”

The on-site design and activities, handled by partners in each venue city, were nearly identical across all four event locations. The New York launch took place at Espace, a large white-space venue in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen (West Midtown) neighborhood. “Everyone walked in to what felt like a regular cocktail reception,” says Jennifer Wang, vice president at EIM. “The whole space was very modern and clean. The suit was not displayed anywhere, just the Speedo logo and a countdown clock projected on the wall, and a few plasma screens playing Speedo content. We kept it very simple. We wanted the hologram presentation and the launch to be the event ‘wow.’”

After about 30 minutes of mingling, an all-but-hidden set of doors that divided the space opened to reveal an entirely new room. But unlike an expected theater setup, this new room seemed eerily empty. There were no massive projection screens or speaker podiums — none of the usual trappings of a major unveiling. Just a small, empty stage with four truss towers. “The film that makes the hologram work is clear and almost invisible, so people had no idea what was going on,” Wang says. “They probably thought it was going to be just another typical launch with a fashion show.”

As soon as event attendees were seated, the lights dimmed. No emcee, no executive talking heads, no canned welcome — just a dark house, quickly lit up with a 10-minute holographic presentation. Detailing Speedo’s 80-year history and the technological advances that led to the LZR Racer, the video seemed to float mid-air on the invisible projection film that would soon beam in Michael Phelps. As Wang recalls, “I could tell it was something they had never seen before. There is a silence that comes over an event when people are in shock at what they are seeing, and that is exactly what happened. It wasn’t the usual two plasmas with onstage presentations, and ‘let me tell you a story.’ It was 3-D.”

While the presentation ran, several Speedo-sponsored swimmers, all zipped into LZR Racer suits, took places on the rear of the stage. As the video wrapped, they moved to the front, flanking the film panels, which now transitioned into a moving, rotating, three-dimensional, and highly lifelike hologram of star athlete Michael Phelps. At the Sydney, Tokyo, and London events, the hologram was as real as Phelps got. But in New York, the real deal was on hand to meet the media. “We had to time it perfectly so when Michael’s hologram stopped spinning and faded out, the real Michael appeared on stage,” Wang says.

Surprisingly, Phelps’ grand entrance at the New York event came in a decidedly low-tech way. “We actually had him walk from the back of the room, right down the middle of the audience,” Wang says. “Hardly anyone noticed him as they were so engaged with the hologram. When the lifelike hologram faded, there was Michael.” A single morning rehearsal the day of the event with the holographic presentation and all the swimmers ensured everyone had their marks and cues.

Following Phelps’ live reveal, photojournalists spent several minutes capturing images of the swimmers, lined up like torpedoes in their LZR Racers. While staff brought seats out for the athletes, Brommers took the stage to lead a Q&A session with attendees, Speedo executives, and swimmers. After the approximately 30-minute session, media attendees were invited to the back of the room for one-on-one interviews, as other attendees moved back into the open cocktail space, where they now found several mannequins sporting the suit. All told, approximately 80 editors, buyers, and influencers attended the New York unveilings with hundreds more attending events in the three other cities.

Dominating the Race

By Feb. 13 — one day after the launch events concluded — a Google search for “LZR Racer” returned more than 9,000 hits, excluding duplicates and similar results. By mid-April, the suit had its own Wikipedia entry. And by mid-August — Olympics time — Google was serving up a whopping 138,000 unique results. “We quantified that we generated roughly $25 million in global publicity just the week of the launch alone,” Brommers says.

Its media goals were more than surpassed. Still, a hot Google trendline wasn’t Speedo’s only objective. “This event wasn’t just a marketing exercise for us,” Brommers says. “It is a true business. And we’ve recognized millions of dollars in retailer orders. It’s definitely ahead of projections.”

To have stellar performance backing up the hype certainly helped. “It was a marketer’s dream. Just days after the launch, three new world records were set in the first two days of competition when the suit was available,” Brommers says. By Aug. 1, leading up to the Beijing opening ceremonies, swimmers wearing the suit already had broken dozens of world records, leading some in the sport to equate the suit with “technological doping.”

Coverage of the launch — and the controversy resulting from its unprecedented success — gained the brand ongoing presence in non-sports media such as The Economist, Wallpaper, Gizmodo, Fast Company, Salon.com, Popular Science, Wired, and the Huffington Post, among others. From fashion media dissecting the suit’s innovative Kawakubo design to scientific media dissecting its construction and engineering, the LZR Racer had become a broadscale media darling.

To sustain the buzz, Speedo returned to its free-media strategy and followed up with a series of media-trial events, both formal (such as the Speedo Omega Media Challenge, held in conjunction with the U.S. Olympic Trials in Omaha, NE, at which nearly 50 media reps “competed” in the trials pool wearing LZR Racers), and informal (in which Speedo provided LZR Racer suits to numerous journalists for them to try on their own). Participants’ hilarious recountings of their efforts to squeeze into the tighter-than-skin suit to squeeze out some test laps — and their surprise at the results — kept the LZR Racer above the fold for months.

“The theatricality of the events along with the product to back it up allowed us to cross over to media channels that might not otherwise cover it,” Brommers says. “CNBC, Pink is the New Blog, fashion press — the story really cut across a lot of different channels and made a lot of good noise.”

It was vindication for Brommers’ early confidence. Three weeks after the Feb. 12 launch event in New York, he said, “We’ve never launched a suit this early. We’ve traditionally launched closer to April. But we had such a good story. I can say now confidently that we will be the biggest brand at the Beijing Olympics.”

Biggest brand, indeed. By late July, even Nike had capitulated to the LZR Racer momentum. Nike, which reputedly has some of the tightest contractual requirements of any sports marketer, announced that it would let the four Team USA swimmers who are signed with Nike to wear the LZR Racer at the Beijing Olympics rather than its own Nike Swim products. “This one set a new bar,” Brommers says. “You can’t say that you beat Nike very often.” But when you’ve got a product as hot as the LZR Racer, a marketing strategy as solid as Phelps’ abs, and a challenge to go big or go home, you take a lesson from Nike itself and “just do it.” e