This Girl Can - Phenomenal Women
The iconic campaign returns, bigger than ever before
I was part of the team tasked with the follow up to the original This Girl Can campaign. Our challenge was two fold: deliver a standout second instalment and get even more women to get out there and break a sweat.
Rather than just a TVC, we delivered a truly integrated campaign, spanning TV, social, digital, OOH, print, content, and more.
The TVC features Maya Angelou's Phenomenal Woman, showcasing girls and women across the UK being active. You can watch this here: https://youtu.be/kCdrJS1ojD8
While I was part of the team that contributed to it, I primarily led the work on all other channels – in particular new formats like social and digital.
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.
New Stories and Formats
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. The content films racked up 9.9 million views on Facebook and YouTube alone, with no media spend.
New Ways to Reach Women
One of the goals of the campaign was to encourage women who'd stopped being active to start again. This posed a challenge – how to reach these women whose only commonality was what they weren't doing.
So for the first time ever, we targeted playlists on Spotify that WEREN’T being listened to.
This sort of reverse contextual targeting was a first for both 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 gave the website an overhaul, turning women’s stories into ways to enage with new sports. These bios capture the role of sport in the lives of a variety of women and link to further information about how women could join in. I rewrote all webcopy and developed the new tone of voice for This Girl Can outside of TV as a part of this.
We also updated the This Girl Can App, which allows women across the UK to make their own posters featuring our mantras. While the fiirst burst of the campaign was live, over 48,000 posters have been made.
Great results (and my first ever Lions)
The campaign was big success with real women and within the industry. We got Campaign’s Ad of the Day, Pick of the Week, and landed in the Top 10 Film Ads and Top 10 Meaningful brands of 2017. We won a Silver, Bronze, and two shortlists at Cannes – my first ever Cannes Lions! – as well as awards like Campaign New Media Thinking’s Best in Targeting Excellence.