Sport England’s ultimate objective for This Girl Can was to get more women aged 14-40 in England exercising regularly. However the campaign also had two vital sub-objectives. Firstly, to be relevant and inspiring enough that women would want to become a part of, talk about and ?share it with friends and family. Secondly, the campaign idea had to allow for multiple partners to leverage it.
Creative Execution
In England, two million fewer women than men were exercising regularly, despite 75% of these women saying they wanted to be more active. Existing sports advertising, the London 2012 Olympics and the obvious health benefits had failed to inspire them. Clearly, we needed a different approach.
We discovered a unifying barrier standing between women and exercise: the fear of being judged – for their appearance, physical ability or simply for prioritising exercising over other things such as family. This Girl Can tackles this head on, featuring street-cast women who are already out there jiggling, wiggling and perspiring with pride.
Prior to the main launch, we seeded the conversation online with empowering content films and proactively responded to tweets about exercise anxiety with encouragement and support. A 90’ TV spot then followed, supported by outdoor and digital. Over 37 million views later, women all over the world have been inspired to become girls who can.
In one year our community has grown from zero to 324,000 on Facebook, 82,000 on Twitter and 26,000 on Instagram. The total campaign has had 37 million views and campaign mentions have surpassed 660,000. Recently a Facebook fan even revealed the first This Girl Can tattoo.
Currently 7,000 partners have downloaded the campaign toolkit. Sports clubs, universities and BBC Get Inspired have produced memes of the 90” film, whilst parents, schools and large companies including Credit Suisse are using This Girl Can to encourage women to become more active.
Most importantly, between March-July 2015, quantitative tracking conducted with 1,000 women found that over 1 in 3 women who had seen the campaign claimed to increase their activity levels as a result. A separate qualitative study concluded, “Almost all who have viewed the campaign talk of a shift in feeling – an increase in motivation to participate in sport and exercise”.
We discovered a unifying barrier stopping women from exercising: the fear of being judged – for their appearance, ability or for spending time exercising. The strategy was to liberate our audience from the fear of judgement by celebrating that women come in all shapes and sizes and all levels of ability.
Film and outdoor executions championed a new language for women and exercise, and provided truly relatable role models. We gave encouragement and support to our audience through social media, and digital content was seeded on relevant sites. Finally, an in-depth toolkit allowed for partners to create content on behalf.