The story of rowing in South Africa is an underdog story. Rowing is a niche, overlooked sport that not many care about. Compared to other top rowing nations and even other sports in SA, like rugby, soccer and cricket, Rowing SA has to make do with minimal national investment. Despite this, our rowers consistently achieve success on the world stage. It proves that the numbers do not define them, they’re defined by their courage.

We set out to garner support for our rowers ahead of the Tokyo Olympics with an emotive branded content documentary, ‘A Story of Courage’. But while shooting the documentary, the rowers were faced with their greatest challenge yet: the Olympics got cancelled due to Covid-19. Instead of giving up, they adapted to the new lockdown conditions. And we adapted too, turning our Olympic sponsorship campaign into something greater to inspire South Africans during this difficult time.

The rowers’ personal, individual stories of courage resonated with ordinary South Africans beyond sport, so we amplified their voices through multiple digital media channels. From highly crafted social vignette videos, to responsive HTML5 banners and story-style equations on Instagram stories.

Through our bespoke online experience, users could engage deeper with the documentary by sharing the individual stories of courage as social vignettes, and supporting the rowers by doing so. Depending on where in the documentary the user was, custom sharing prompts would appear on the timeline for people to interact with. Interacting at these moments would dynamically share that specific story of courage to their desired social platform, spreading the content organically and driving more engagement back to the site.

The entire site was built from scratch catering for both a desktop and mobile friendly experience, meaning the user interface and documentary itself needed to be specifically crafted for landscape and portrait viewing.

Our campaign resulted in completed views of the documentary being 650% above the industry average and over 21 minutes spent on the site. RMB Twitter conversation increased by over 77%. Our click through rate was 6-times the industry average, and positive brand sentiment increased by 40%.