Designed for Success: The secret of winning creativity - FCB Inferno on This Girl Can
The Drum, in association with JKR, is catching up with some of this year’s Cannes Lions award winners to discover the secrets of their success.
Sport England and FCB Inferno London last night picked up one of the first Glass Lion awards, for This Girl Can. The campaign has been on a winning streak at Cannes 2015 also picking up the Grand Prix for Good, an award for public service and non-profit campaigns.
The integrated campaign, which launched on social media before running across TV and outdoor, was designed to encourage more women to exercise. It featured women of all ages and sizes exercising, accompanied by personal mantras like “Damn Right I Look Hot” and “I Kick Balls, Deal With It”.
The Drum sat down on the beach with a celebrating FCB to discuss the secret of the campaign’s success.
The most important factor behind the instant engagement it was able to generate in its audience was its authenticity. Arguably one of the most overused words in the industry today, it couldn’t be more appropriate for This Girl Can. FCB Inferno strategist Nic Willison described how the campaign was built from the ground up from the ground up through interaction with real women.
“Our casting agent was running around parks, talking to women about how they feel about exercise and we didn’t pre-write the lines we used in the ads at all, they all came directly from the interviews. The campaign featured women that weren’t retouched at all, the sort of people you’d never normally see in a sports campaign. Real people the audience could immediately empathise with.”
The insight for the campaign was delivered through over 600 pages of research looking into the barriers women put up for themselves not exercising. Aside from lack of money or time, the rest all boiled down to issues over how they would be judged.
“One of the common reasons was along the the lines of ‘I’m not fit enough to get fit’, which was clearly crazy and driven by the huge disparity between the way women are portrayed in sports advertising and real women,” said FCB Inferno account director Holi Loxley. The pair are most obviously proud of the way the campaign has taken on a life of its own and started a movement. Such is the power of its engagement, the agency has never had to step in to defend the campaign against outside criticism, instead relying on what it calls its ‘tinkerbells’.
“The internet has trolls but This Can Girl Can has tinkerbells, the passionate supporters in our audience that will leap to its defence,” said Willison. “When it launched it came in for some mild criticism on a TV show and although we had our heart in our mouth, our supporters jumped in to defend it on social media and we didn’t have to say a word.”
I applaud this campaign as someone in 'the industry' for its power and its ability to make you sit up and notice it. It's got a vitality that is impossible to ignore
As a Dad of 2 young daughters who saw this I witnessed the effect. #thisgirlcan became #thisgirldid in our house.
Lee Rolston
Strategy Director, jkr