Brand Oath and Tanami develop winning bid campaign for World Athletics Indoor Championships

Two Edinburgh-based creative agencies, brand specialist Brand Oath, and content production company Tanami, owned by the Cello Signal Group, developed the winning bid campaign for the World Athletics Indoor Championships for Glasgow and Scotland in 2024.

World Athletics announced on Wednesday 1 December 2021 that Glasgow will host the championships following a successful bid process. The Emirates Arena will stage the biggest indoor athletics championships in the world, five years on from holding the European Athletics Indoor Championships in 2019.

Brand Oath won a tender to work with the stakeholders to develop the bid campaign strategy, brand identity and associated collateral required in the decision-making process. 

Brand Oath focused on creating a clear and simple logo. It was inspired by the classic indoor running track graphics and presented at an angle to reflect the upward trajectory of standards working with Glasgow will deliver. Brand Oath aimed to design a logo that would also transform easily into a device to carry core messages of the campaign to the audience. The agency also developed a 120-page bid book answering the World Athletics bid questionnaire.

Julie Shaw-Binns, director of Brand Oath, says “This was a fantastic experience for us, we had to draw on all of our expertise in this niche area to identify the strategy shaping insights, turning those into a strong campaign positioning and narrative, and finally implement it into clear and coherent design outputs.”

Tanami was in charge of creating a 60-second film providing an outline of our concept behind the bid and a 10-minute film providing a more detailed explanation of the bid’s vision, objectives and outputs World Athletics could expect.

“It was always going to be a challenge and, as such, we took great care to ensure our story left the decision makers in no doubt of our passion and purpose. We maintained engagement through high energy, enthusiastic voices and pulled out the key messages with supporting statistics and data. We incorporated interviews with stills, archive footage and eye-catching graphics for a varied and engaging pitch,” says Jemma Goba, managing partner of Tanami.