Virgin Media is to air a TV ad paying tribute to Usain Bolt as the world’s fastest man looks to make history at the Olympic Games in Rio.
The 100-second TV ad, narrated by fellow sprinter Michael Johnson, will launch in Wednesday’s Euro 2016 quarter final match between Wales and Portugal on ITV.
It uses a series of sequences that are 9.58 seconds long – the world record 100m time Bolt set in 2009.
Unusually the TV ad, part of a wider multimillion-pound ad campaign, does not push a specific Virgin Media package.
“It is designed to be a celebration,” said Kerris Bright, chief marketing officer at Virgin Media. “A celebration of speed. We wanted to tell a different type of story about Usain Bolt. An emotive story about him, speed, in a way that links back to Virgin Media.”
The campaign, which runs with the strapline Be the Fastest, included a stunt on the river Thames involving the London Eye and a 100m long video screen to recreate his 9.58 second sprint.
The wider campaign will use media including outdoor, press and social media and promote Virgin Media’s Vivid 200Mbps broadband.
Virgin first approached Bolt about potentially featuring in its ads after the then 22-year-old rose to worldwide fame after his double gold medal win at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
He started appearing in Virgin Media ads from about 2012, the year London hosted the Olympics.
The latest ad campaign was created by agency BBH with media planning and buying by Manning Gottlieb OMD.
