I am not a ‘runner’. I have completed Couch to 5K and gone no further. I’ll occasionally plod around my small Glasgow suburb if my diet gets a little too... Scottish. But when I do pound the pavements, the song that gets one resistant foot in front of the other is ‘Get Ur Freak On’. It’s the first tune on an ambitiously long playlist. In fact, it is so synonymous with my ad hoc jogging that hearing it in any other context tends to elicit a sort of panicked reaction in my body.
Why am I oversharing like this? Well, the Missy Elliott classic was the soundtrack to the incredible ‘This Girl Can’ advert from 2015, Sport England’s rallying cry to women of all shapes, sizes and abilities to work out and play more sports. Created by FCB Inferno, the final scene is of a sweat-drenched woman flopping to her couch, knackered but euphoric having run the length of a street. A decade later, that scene comes to mind every time I hear the little voice in my head tell me just to bed rot for another hour.
The people I have to thank for this love/hate relationship with running (and Missy Elliott) are this week's Big Interview subjects: Kate Dale, Sport England’s marketing director, and Sharon Jiggins, who worked on the initial brief at FCB and is now managing partner at 23Red, the ad agency currently tasked with leading the movement. And it is a movement. I was one of four million women who were so inspired by that campaign that they started to exercise just a little more.
“I've had women tell me that when they’re out running, they’ll see a group of men and have that ‘Oh God’ moment, and they’ll sing that song in their head to get them past. Or to get them started,” says Dale in response to my ‘Running’ playlist anecdote, a story I’m sure she’s heard a version of a hundred times before.
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The original energetic and empowering film was intended to address the fear of judgment that so many women feel when exercising. Back then, two million fewer British women participated in sports compared with men, despite the vast majority wanting to do more. Immediately after the campaign, nearly three million women between 14 and 40 years old said they had done some or more activity because of the ad, and that number has continued to grow over the years.
It was a phenomenal response. Since then, This Girl Can has cleaned up at industry award shows and been held up as the gold standard in behavior-change marketing. “It blows my mind that we’ve done this. I sometimes think if we’d known what it would become, we would never have dared to start it,” says Dale.
It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on just how much of their careers these two marketers have dedicated to this cause. I imagine the success of that first campaign would have opened doors to power brands in the sporting world for anyone involved; that the pair would have been inundated with calls from CEOs to recreate a ‘This Girl Can’ moment at their own companies.
“The job’s not done,” says Dale, explaining why she’s still resolutely focused on the task at hand at Sport England. “It has absolutely been more than just creating an advertising campaign. It matters. I’m someone who wasn’t sporty at school, I didn’t like it, and I’ve had a rubbish relationship with my body. Working on ‘This Girl Can’ has changed my life. I now enjoy getting active just for the sake of it, not for an end goal.”
Over the last 10 years, Sport England has built an online community of nearly a million women across social platforms and forged partnerships with major brands such as Sure, Disney, Strava and British Cycling to spread the message. In 2020, it released a follow-up called ‘Me Again’ (shown below) to equally widespread acclaim. Since then, Dale and Jiggins have been beavering away behind the scenes to figure out the next iteration.
The team’s problem from the beginning has been that funding for ‘This Girl Can’ comes from the public via the National Lottery and was only approved on an annual basis. Dale couldn’t give Jiggins’s team at 23Red more than 12 months’ notice for creative ideation; they couldn’t book media or seriously map a strategy to incite long-term change.
But now they have finally earned a three-year commitment to funding, meaning they can plan longer-term, build more brand partnerships and invest in paid and above-the-line media. Which brings us to the highly anticipated launch of the new work.
This time, Sport England is actively targeting women and girls less likely to be active. These include women on lower incomes, from Black, Asian and Muslim communities, those who are pregnant or mothers of children under one, and women aged 55 and above. Despite the accolades, the original ‘This Girl Can’ didn’t land with these women in a meaningful way and for the last 10 years, Dale admits, they’ve not felt particularly seen or heard.
“It could have been really easy to be get distracted by the ‘This Girl Can’ brand and the fame of the [original ad], and want to do another version of it. But it had to come back to what was going to work for these women that said that the original didn’t connect with them. We needed to get into their world, be in their places and spaces,” explains Jiggins.
What comes next is a lesson in behavior-change marketing. It also speaks to the two personalities at the helm.
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To better understand the disconnect, Dale and Jiggins put their decades of combined experience aside and established a number of advisory panels comprised of women from marginalized demographics. Led by Patricia Macauley, founder of market research agency MMC, they wanted to better understand the motivations and, more importantly, barriers to exercise among this group. The importance of these women in influencing the campaign can’t be overstated. In a world where rebrands and campaign taglines are being torn apart by both sides of the political spectrum, having South Asian and Black women inform it from the start was critical.
“We needed to recognize that a lot of us working on the campaign didn’t have that lived experience. We needed to be careful we were not ‘othering’ the women who we are trying to reach and that we truly understood their lives. We needed to represent them in a a way that didn’t feel exploitative or, you know, like some sort of anthropomorphic exercise,” says Dale.
Additional research found that only one in 10 women feel like they belong in the world of activity. And one in 10 women have cried because they’ve had an awful experience exercising.
“I heard a story on the radio recently,” continues Dale, in an effort to show just how pervasive this problem is. “An older woman had gone to a workout class and she loved the first two and felt good. At the third one, the instructor changed. It was a young man, and he said, ‘Oh, you’re too old to be here.’ She went home and never went back. You have a negative experience like that and if you’re not comfortable in that space you don’t think 'Oh, that was a shit class.’ You think: ‘I’m not meant for this. I can’t do it.’ So we’re really trying to tackle that.”
The resulting work, created by 23Red and partner agency House of Oddities, runs with the tagline ‘Belonging Starts with Inclusion.’ To reach those who feel furthest away from getting active, it stars real-life women exercising in their own way to send the message that as little as 10 minutes of movement a day can have an impact. Everything from the sports they participate in to what they wear has been shaped by the feedback from those audience insight sessions.
It also needed an iconic anthem like ‘Get Ur Freak On’ to engage this new cohort of women. To that end, it plays out to a more inclusive reworking of the BodyRockers’ track ‘I Like the Way’.
“We just want it to be that earworm when women are maybe at that moment of hesitation, that song will come into their head and it will be the motivation they need,” says Jiggins.
And the extensive media plan underpinning it will certainly aim to deliver on that promise. The ad will soon run across TV, video-on-demand, radio and social and digital platforms. It will lean on media deals with Channel 4, Amaliah, Black Ballad and Diversity Media to amplify the campaign’s message through both mainstream and culturally specific outlets. Content will be tailored across various languages to ensure accessibility and relevance for underrepresented audiences.
In short, every element of the plan was designed to reach women and inspire action. Sport England has been able to be so unapologetic at showing real women – cellulite, menstruating, sweating and all – because it doesn’t have a board to address or an anti-woke mob (increasingly linking a certain body type to political affiliation) to placate. It’s not trying to flog products or get the viewers to buy into anything other than the idea that they can move their bodies more. For every ad Nike shows of someone we can all relate to, it will also air a spot starring intimidatingly brilliant athletes at the top of their game. And that’s perpetuating the belief that sport is only for a certain type of person.
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“I am aware that it’s easy for us to have that strategic, long-term thinking because we don’t have to worry about shareholders, we don’t have to worry about woke, anti-woke, or whatever,” says Dale of the ongoing tropes that exist in the world of sports marketing. “I’m not saying that we are perfect and we get it all right, but we can actually be the [brand] that’s absolutely relatable and saying it doesn’t matter what you look like or wear, because we don’t have to sell you anything.”
Dale and Jiggins have spent an admirable part of their careers leading this movement and ‘fighting the good fight’, as they call it. And they show no signs of stopping. They used to say that for ‘This Girl Can’ to be truly successful, it would cease to exist altogether; if the need for a movement that empowered women was gone, they would have won. But if anything, they say, unrealistic beauty standards in advertising are creeping back on to our screens and they might be further than they’d like in achieving that end goal.
“Everything goes in circles and fashions and fads come and go, and that’s why we need a constant beat of ‘This Girl Can’. We can just keep pulling people back and just showing the alternative, the better way that makes people feel good about themselves,” says Dale. “You think 10 years is a long time, but it’s not really when it’s set against the decades of advertising centered on patriarchal attitudes.”