Special Olympics Canada put its faith in the public with a purpose-driven marketing approach for the 2025 World Winter Games. The response, the national sports body says, was golden.

As part of the “Joy is Gold” campaign, Special Olympics Canada (SOC) sent out a call to businesses across the country to devote time to playing curated daily highlights on their public-facing screens during the World Winter Games in Turin, Italy, from March 8 to 15.

The goal of the activation was to build a daily presence for SOC athletes in the country’s lobbies, waiting rooms, stores, salons and bars, while setting the stage for grassroots growth and engagement beyond traditional media channels.

Sarah Barker, SOC’s VP of brand, marketing and communications, tells strategy that the countrywide out-of-home concept had the dual benefit of raising awareness for the Games while allowing the organization to diversify its promotional spend.

“One of the strengths of this initiative is its scalability and efficiency,” Barker says. “We were able to amplify the campaign’s reach without incurring significant additional costs. This allowed us to focus our marketing budget on high-impact creative assets, paid media and digital activations to ensure broad visibility. It’s a testament to how innovative thinking can stretch resources while delivering meaningful results.”

The concept gave businesses that might not have had significant sponsorship budgets the chance to still get involved and donate by using infrastructure that was already in place. Participating businesses were given access to a centralized platform where downloads or streams of daily highlight reels were available. SOC hosted the content on a secure server that ensured easy access and compatibility for various screen setups.

“The idea draws inspiration from the broader trend of purpose-driven marketing, where brands and organizations collaborate to create meaningful impact,” says Fernando Hernandez, executive creative director at Grey Canada, which spearheaded the creative for the campaign. “We prioritized simplicity to encourage maximum participation and ensure businesses could easily integrate the content into their operations.”

Barker says SOC was thrilled by the response to the screen-sharing campaign and that hundreds of businesses had already taken part in the initiative during the early days of World Winter Games.

“Joy is Gold” also included a call to action for Canadians to donate toward athlete expenses in 60-, 15- and six-second OLV and in static and animated OOH and social-media content.

Media activations on digital taxi tops, TTC screens, large-format OOH, convenience-store screens, digital-display ads and on paid social platforms were also used during the campaign.

Grey Canada led the creative development, GroupM and Aber Group led media amplification and Hype PR and Burson Canada backed public relations and influencers.