Bring Your Beat to London 2012

By Mia Lazzarini

The London Olympics 2012: we have known about it for years and honestly, we have seen it all before. Except this year has something new to offer, something that hasn’t been done at past Olympic games, something that has never been done before. Mark Ronson has teamed up with long-time Olympic sponsor Coca-Cola to produce the global marketing campaign ‘Move to the Beat of London 2012’. Aimed primarily at teenagers across the globe, the campaign uses the various sounds of sport and music, fusing the two to create a unique soundtrack. 

Selected to participate in the campaign are five young up and coming Olympic athletes: Russian superhero sprinter Kseniya Vdovina; Singaporean Robin Hood-like archer Dayyan Jaffar; English table tennis hero Darius Knight; American mammoth hurdler David Oliver; and Mexican taekwondo legend Maria Espinoza. Their sports will be creating the sounds for the Move to the Beat of London soundtrack, with Katy B. providing the lyrics.

The campaign is set to be global in scale, designed to reach teens from every corner of the world. Already there are commercials advertising the campaign and the Beat 2012 Documentary is to be released later this year. The campaign has gone beyond just film, with Monorex and High Rise Murals creating the Coke Move to the Beat Mural, also known as The Beat Wall, situated in Hackney, East London. And because that simply was not enough, a large part of the campaign is ‘Bring Your Beat to London 2012’, whereby people are able to remix the sport sounds recorded to make their own music. They even have a free phone app called ‘My Beat Maker’, so you’re free to make your beat wherever you may be. Coca-Cola and Ronson have declared that they hope to make this ‘the largest musical collaboration in history’. 

So get on board, get listening and get remixing. It’s not everyday that you are encouraged to fuse sport and music into a musical genre where you create the beat.

You can watch one of the videos here