Pedalling Pride: Fuelling Olympic Buzz Across Aotearoa
With the Paris 2024 Olympic Games fast approaching, the New Zealand Olympic Committee launched Tour de Fern: Sprint for the Fern - a nationwide cycling simulation event series designed to ignite the Olympic spirit in Aotearoa.
Common Ground PR was brought on board to support the campaign with targeted media activity designed to boost awareness, drive attendance and connect everyday Kiwis with the Olympic spirit.
The activation invited the public to race 300 virtual metres down the Champs-Élysées on Technogym smart bikes - competing against friends, family and even Olympic athletes. Our job was to make sure people knew about it, showed up and felt inspired.
Results: Connection, Coverage and Cut-Through
We led a national and regional media rollout timed to each event stop - securing coverage across mainstream, broadcast, lifestyle, sport and regional titles. Our focus was on telling human-centred stories: athlete interviews, behind-the-scenes Olympic prep and community reactions to the tour. This achieved:
Over 30 earned media pieces across TV, radio, digital and print
$570,000 in earned media value & 3.44M+ opportunity-to-see (OTS) across all coverage
Coverage highlights included TVNZ Breakfast, NZ Herald, Stuff, RNZ, Crowd Goes Wild, Sunday Magazine, North & South and The Breeze
The tour’s immersive format and strong athlete presence made it inherently newsworthy. We maximised this through a staged approach - refreshing the media narrative city by city and leveraging Olympian attendance to maintain momentum across the six-week tour.
This was an accessible, energising campaign that brought Olympic fever home and helped set the stage for Kiwi support ahead of Paris 2024.
