Title	SALOMON CITYTRAIL
Brand	SALOMON
Product/Service	CITYTRAIL
Category	A09. USE OR INTEGRATION OF DIGITAL OR SOCIAL MEDIA
Entrant Company	MNSTR Paris, FRANCE
Contributing Company	MNSTR Paris, FRANCE

Name	Company	Position
Bonichon Louis	MNSTR	Creative Directeur
Cheroux Mathieu	MNSTR	Art Director
Rose Jean Louis	MNSTR	Project Director
Clerc Stéphane	MNSTR	Account Manager
Mouradian Taline	MNSTR	Deputy Managing Director

The Campaign

Brand entertainment plays an increasingly central role within sports marketing, where authenticity is core to success. At the core, audiences are demanding to be advertised to less, and involved and entertained more. To leverage this, Salomon have created a brand content ecosystem, focused around Facebook & YouTube, reaching millions of runners each year with Salomon Running TV (currently in its third season) and with Kilian’s Quest, a video series based on the achievements of mountain runner Kilian Jornet, National Geographic Adventurer Of The Year in 2014. There are no specific regulations about brand content, but it’s important to note that the campaign is truly global — with activations across 19 local markets.

Results

Salomon is the global benchmark for trail running — running in the natural surroundings. For Salomon’s arrival within town and city running, we leveraged the brand’s challenger positioning. Where traditional brands focus on performance, we created an exploration-based running experience that seeks to reconnect inner-city people to nature. To inspire this new practice, we launched the CITYTRAIL project: a co-creation project that invites runners around the world to map their city, according to their running trails. To anchor the practice and recruit followers, we deployed an activation campaign that combined local, digital & social media engagement — with the outputs being a series of global brand content. The grass roots activity was built around Community Runs , which was organized by distributors and led by a coach. 600 social running sessions have been held simultaneously in 19 countries – including cities such as Tokyo, Berlin, Bilbao or Paris — each of which served to fuel the CITYTRAIL app. At the core, the app serves to connect a global community of runners, who can create, share and explore cities around the world, via one another’s recommendations. A single hashtag connects all of the activity; #CITYTRAIL — with the community proudly spreading their involvement throughout social media. Each of the elements combine to create a unique socially powered project, which is set to grow over the following 3 years to build the world’s running cartography.

To maximize the project’s spread, we leveraged Salomon’s core on & offline communities, who provided us with content that we could in turn use to inspire subsequent communities of runners. Offline, we mobilized influential members of communities in key strategic locations, such as Berlin and Barcelona. These influencers served to set the tone for the subsequent activity, as well as providing inner-city credibility for the brand. Online, we rallied the brand’s social media communities, primarily on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, who were invited to join community runs in their city, suggest their favourite running spots and collaboratively map their cities’ most beautiful spots.

Since launch in June 2014, we’ve activated CITYTRAIL across 19 countries. Locally the brand has created in excess of 600 Community Runs, with over 7000 runners taking part in the project. Online, content has reached in excess of 150 000 core runners in its first 3 months of activation. The CITYTRAIL app, which allows users to browse and create CITYTRAIL content, has been downloaded nearly 50 000 times in those 3 months. CITYTRAIL’s official brand content, which covers 145 cities with 179 official routes and over 3000 spots, is now being completed by users themselves as part of the ongoing CITYTRAIL project. More than 500 pieces of user generated content have been published so far, with each piece helping to connect the global community of runners. The #CITYTRAIL hashtag has also been adopted by runners, who have spontaneously tweeted about their CITYTRAIL experience over 2000 times in just 4 months.