Despite nervousness around the 2020 Olympics going ahead, over three-quarters of the Japanese population still planned to tune in and watch. And given there would be no spectators amidst a State of Emergency where people couldn’t dine in restaurants or drink in pubs, the majority would be watching from home on TV. This represented a huge opportunity to tap into a heightened moment of need for at-home food delivery. The problem was, Uber Eats wasn't an official Olympics sponsor, so would need to somehow evade the World’s most tightly-guarded sponsorship regulations.

The brief and objectives were simple - but hard. Hijack the hype around the Games to acquire new users onto the app in a way that drives positive sentiment towards the brand. To answer the brief, we created a daily NAME GAME, dropping a ‘promo code of the day’ which just happened to be the name of the most spoken about person each day. Which also just happened to be Olympics athletes that we weren’t allowed to talk about ourselves. We delivered daily clues in a fun, tongue in cheek manner, dropping over-the-top hints whilst being careful never to mention anything ‘officially’ Olympics related. All our audience had to do was guess who the person of the day was, then use that as a promo code in the Uber Eats app, with successful guesses receiving 50% off their order.

We saw an 8% increase in acquisitions during the campaign period along with a 3% increase in orders and gross sales. Our popular Name Game achieved organic reach of 4.88 million with promo codes running out within 2-3 minutes each day. Overall, a great success.