This Girl Can
The Challenge
Follow up Sport England's iconic This Girl Can campaign with work that would inspire even more women to get out there and break a sweat.
The Approach
An integrated campaign, spanning TV, social, digital, OOH, print, content, and more.
The TV features Maya Angelou's Phenomenal Woman, showcasing girls and women across the UK being active. You can watch this here: https://youtu.be/kCdrJS1ojD8
The Results & Awards
The campaign has been a big success, with our films receiving over 20 million views thus far. More details on results to be added soon, but in the meantime the following awards are worth mentioning:
Cannes Lions
Silver Lion in Outdoor
Bronze Lion in Health & Wellness
Shortlist in Integrated, Creative Effectiveness, and two Health & Wellness categories.
Campaign New Media Thinking Best in Targeting Excellence
Campaign Pick of the Week and in the Top 10 Film Ads of 2017 and Top 10 Meaningful Brands of 2017
New Mantras
We developed headlines based off the real things that women said throughout the shoot. These appear in print, digital, and high-impact OOH placements. They are also on the This Girl Can app, which allows women to create their own posters to share on social media. Women have produced nearly 40,000 posters since our relaunch this February.
This execution is a reference to the infamous "Beach Body Ready" ads for Protein World, and was developed to sit alongside current Protein World creative.
New Stories
I was copywriter and art director on a series of content films that were developed to support the campaign throughout the year. Each features a different girl and different sport, tackling a barrier that they might have come up against – and how they've overcome it.
Eight of the films have gone live already, with more to come. As of 2018, they've racked up over 9.9 million views on Facebook and YouTube alone.
We told new stories not only through content but also through bios that sit on the This Girl Can site. These bios capture the role of sport in the lives of a variety of women and link to further information about the activities themselves.
New Ways to Reach Women
One of the goals of the campaign was to encourage women who'd stopped being active to start again and give it another go. This posed a challenge – how to reach these women whose only commonality was what they weren't doing.
So we had an idea to, for the first time ever, target playlists on Spotify that weren't being listened to. We reached out to women who had listened to a work-out playlist in the past, but who hadn't within the last thirty days, serving them our ad and driving them to more inspiring content.
This sort of reverse contextual targeting was a first for Spotify and for Sport England, allowing us to give that extra bit of reassurance and inspiration to some of the women who needed it the most.
We also updated the This Girl Can App, which allows women across the UK to make their own posters featuring our mantras. To date, over 48,000 posters have been made.
New Content Formats
We've already started to debut new ways to bring sport to life on This Girl Can's social channels, with more to come. This ranges from punchy teasers to kick-off the campaign, video art direction that use headlines to anchor images from all sorts of women, to new content formats entirely. All told, on Facebook, our content has received more than 20 million views– with hopefully more to come.