ad:tech New York: the digital strategies of Lenova

Lenovo: going direct

Talking directly to consumers - and bypassing the intermediating mainstream media in the process - was a primary component of a largely digital "coming-coming out" program Ogilvy put together for Lenovo, the Chinese computer company that acquired IBM's PC Division in 2005.
The place was the 2008 Beijing Olympics. And the place was all over the world. "We asked ourselves, 'How can we use 21st-Century technology to make the Olympics come to life? How can we allow consumers to really feel the Olympics from the inside? And what would happen if we gave 100 Olympic athletes from all over the world laptops and video cameras and asked them to talk about their experiences online?"
The answer was 1.6 million unique visitors to a "Voices of the Olympic Games" web site that featured both written blogs from the participants as well as video diaries. "It was an unfiltered scoop, straight from the athletes," Lazarus recalled. "We reached 256 countries and 27 different sports."

The digital exercise continued with cellphone widgets that offered a link to the Voices site as well as up-to-the-minute results, photographs, records, and background stories. Lazarus called it "the largest social-media market campaign at the largest sporting event in the world… And it gave people a chance to feel Lenovo, to become familiar with the brand."
Perhaps the ultimate compliment came when the International Olympic Committee tried to stop the campaign, charging that Ogilvy and Lenovo were "stealing the content that they had sold exclusively to media outlets," Lazarus said. "What they didn't seem to understand was the true democratization of content. Once it starts, you cannot stop it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4nNd1h52AI