Project Role
Creative Director, Brand Strategy

The Challenge
The Special Olympics is the world's leading sporting event for mentally challenged children and adults. It sponsors several local and international events each year. It's primary event, the World Games, is held every four years before the Olympics and will be held in Shanghai, China in 2007. The Special Olympics needed a branding package for the 2007 World Games including an overall brand theme, symbol and public service announcement video. A particular challenge here was encouraging involvement from local Chinese who are generally not as open or accepting of the mentally challenged as Western cultures.

The Solution
The overall branding and theme came from the concept of "Celebration and Community" - a platform that incorporates ideas of personal excellence with sharing and support. The primary idea, communicated through the tagline "Celebrate Your Gift," focused on the World Games as a chance to share in the achievements of the athletes as well as discovering the personal achievements we all bring to the event.

The brand symbols developed were light and colourful, many of which played with Chinese written characters such as "shang" which can connote "above" or "excelling" and is a part of Shang-hai and "zhong" meaning "central" or "coming together" and is part of the name China - Zhong Guo. The public services announcement showing individual athletes working hard to achieve excellence while focusing on the support network - parents, friends, coaches - that helped them get there.

Deliverables
Retail Sales CD-ROM
Sales Demo CD-ROM

Hong Kong TDC
Special Olympics
Communication Central


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