Sport England is rolling out the next phase of its much admired and highly successful ‘This Girl Can’ campaign with a fresh focus on boosting sports participation amongst specific female demographic groups – particularly teens, mums and women in their 50s and 60s.
The initiative’s latest ‘bolder’ activation wave extends the first campaign’s demographic female focus beyond the original target of engaging and encouraging exercise among 14 to 40-year-old women and now is targeting women in specific life phases for whom apperance and athleteic ability anxiety may not be the only barriers to getting more active.
Including older 40-plus women and new mothers.
The latest strand of the programme follows a new set of research from the public body focusing how women start and stop exercising at different phases in their lives and its core objective is to reach women during the periods in their life when it is more challenging to exercise and encourage and support them to participate.
As with the original campaign, this follow-up phase is rolling out in stages.
Late January saw the campaign open with a teaser phase offering early glimpses of the new wave of creative on Sport England’s digital and social platforms such as Twitter,
Bring on the burn! #ThisGirlCan pic.twitter.com/4thghnuPvI
— This Girl Can (@ThisGirlCanUK) January 27, 2017
Facebook and Instagram.
and an OOH poster strand (which includes flagship poster sites and transport related properties such as the London Underground) with taglines such as ‘Unleash Your Inner Beginner’.
The spearhead new TV spot, directed by Kem Gehrig through Somesuch, then followed with the next phase in late February with supporting pre-release social teasers
running ahead of the spot’s debut.
The new commercial blends Maya Angelou’s 1978 poem ‘Phenomenal Woman’ with dynamic, attitudinal imagery of women in the target groups excrcising.
Just like the first TV ad, it was first posted online at midday before debuting on-air during Coronation Street on Friday night (24 February).
After which, the FCB Inferno created campaign is then continuing to roll out with fresh creative and new executions across both digital, social and further OOH, as well as organisational partnerships -deploying across a wide range of platforms from Twitter,
Jiggling, sweating, taking a breather – however you do it, it's phenomenal. Our new ad is here, thanks to National Lottery! #ThisGirlCan pic.twitter.com/j02GCtpa0P
— This Girl Can (@ThisGirlCanUK) February 24, 2017
to Instagram Stories.
Another interesting element of the campaign will see a This Girl Can app enable women to upload a picture of themselves exercising and overlay one of the new campaign mantras onto it.
Sport England will then select some of these consumer-created, self-customised executions to be shown on digital out-of-home screens in shopping centres across the UK.
‘This Girl Can’ has been something of a genre-defying initiative for the UK sports industry and has been turning heads, changing minds and driving participation by challenging and embracing the notion that that women sweat when they exercise.
The original campaign was developed after research and insights that it is a ‘fear of judgement of others’ that is the primary barrier to makes women reluctant to participate in sport.
The initiative – from its advertising campaign to participatory programmes and governing body/team partnerships – tackles this fear as it aims to close the gender gap in sports participation.
Despite the campaign’s stunning success, Sport England chief executive Jennie Price admits that there is still a lot more to do when it comes to addressing and narrowing this participation gap.
‘Most women still feel judged when they play sport or exercise. We feel guilty for stopping and starting, for hesitating, for not looking perfect,’ explains Price.
‘The women and girls in this campaign remind us that’s normal and create some strong images that we hope millions of women will relate to.’
Activative Comment:
The original campaign was also initially teased in late 2014 (see case study), before its main launch at the beginning of 2015 (see case study).
It has proved a serious success, has been viewed around 100 million times and has been credited for getting as many as 1.6 million more women exercising (while 2.8 million who are aware of the campaign say they have become more active as a result) and it has won more than 50 international awards, including no less than nine Cannes Lions.
Its Cannes awards include both the Grand Prix for Good and the Cannes Glass Lion, which is awarded to work which shatters the gender biases that still persist in advertising and society.
So the new campaign, developed with FCB Inferno (where the team on the new phase was led by copywriter Martin McCallister and art director Ben Edwards) presents the creative agency with the classic, tricky second-album challenge.
Indeed, FCB Inferno’s chief creative officer Al Young admits the second brief presents ‘a huge challenge’.
‘This time round we have focused on the roller coaster realities of the relationship with exercise – something that is rarely talked about,’ explains Young.
‘We are confident this will help even more girls and women manage their fear of judgement when getting active.’
Sport England, initially established as the English Sports Council in 1996, is a non-departmental public body under the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Its role is to build the foundations of a community sport system by working with national governing bodies of sport, and other funded partners, to grow the number of people doing sport; sustain participation levels; and help more talented people from all diverse backgrounds excel by identifying them early, nurturing them, and helping them move up to the elite level.
‘It’s easy to surprise and delight people when you’ve got no expectations,’ outlines This Girl Can campaign manager Kate Dale.
‘This time around, however, we are allowed to be a bit bolder, by showing the lines and cellulite in a stronger way than we would have felt able to do last time, adds Dale – explaining that Sport England and FCB chose to keep those things that made the last campaign successful (such as street casting, real women talking about their stories and no Photoshop) and look across a wider generational range.
‘Older women said they had strong connections to the campaign beforehand, but they spoke about the fear of being a beginner. At 46, you’re maybe a little bit less inclined to start something new, so that’s what we’re directly tackling. We want to normalise the beginner and highlight that exercise is not just about the physical benefits but also about personal development,’ she adds.
Links:
Sport England
https://www.youtube.com/user/thisgirlcanuk
https://www.facebook.com/pages/This-Girl-Can/1486200494975441?ref=profile
https://plus.google.com/106091288943299282651/videos
https://twitter.com/ThisGirlCanUK
#ThisGirlCan
http://instagram.com/thisgirlcanuk
FCB Inferno
