#ThisGirlCan Campaign Inspires Women To Wiggle & Jiggle With Pride & Purpose

A government effort to promote physical fitness among women takes a cue from marketers like Dove.

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Sport England, a government agency tasked with convincing women to exercise, has launched This Girl Can, a campaign to “inspire women to wiggle, jiggle, move and prove that judgment is a barrier that can be overcome.”

The campaign, created by FCB Inferno, is based on research that found 2 million fewer women than men are regularly exercising despite the finding that 75% of women age 14 to 40 stating they’d like to exercise.

Of the campaign’s approach, Sport England CEO Jennie Price said, [blockquote] “Any woman will tell you about the internal dialog that goes on in her head, particularly when she thinks about sport, exercise and getting fit. It’s stuff like ‘I’m too fat to do this’ or ‘I’m not fit enough to go to that class’, or ‘If I get on that treadmill and press that button and fall off, I’m going to look really stupid and everybody is going to stare at me, and I’m certainly not going to wear those clothes to do it’. We are trying to say it’s perfectly normal to feel like that, don’t beat yourself up about it.”[/blockquote]

To convey the notion that exercise is, indeed, normal for all women and not just those perfectly shaped Olympic athlete types, the organization connected with seven women to highlight their lives and their relationships with exercise.

The campaign includes a video, which is also airing as a TV commercial, in which the seven women go about their exercise routines while statements including, “I jiggle therefore I am”, “Sweating like a pig,” “Feeling like a fox,” “I kick balls, deal with it” and “Damn right I look hot” are overlaid:

Since launch January 12, the video has been viewed over 518,000 times, 8,000 of those views in the time it took to write this article.

Accompanying the video is a microsite on which each of the women have an extended personal profile in video format. (They can also be viewed on the campaign’s YouTube page.) The site also contains a section where anyone can dig into hundreds of forms of exercise, get an overview of that specific exercise, how much it might cost and find out how to begin.

In addition, there is a socially-fueled section of the site entitled “Feel Inspired” where social content tagged with the campaign’s hashtag, #ThisGirlCan, is pulled from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Vine, YouTube and Google+.

The campaign’s Twitter account, which has 18,8000 followers, is promoting the campaign:

The campaign even thanked Missy Elliott, who lent her song, Get Ur Freak On, to the campaign for mentioning the ad on Twitter:

The campaign’s Facebook page, which has 43,485 likes, is promoting the campaign:

And, they’re working their Instagram account, as well:
[instagram]http://instagram.com/p/xw6VL9usH4/embed/[/instagram]

The campaign also includes a series of posters which will appear as billboards:

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Of the ads use of non-model, regular woman, the ad’s director, Kim Gehrig said: [blockquote]“I wanted to make the first advert that ever celebrated cellulite. You never get campaigns like this. They don’t exist. Women are usually spoken to through beauty or fashion, it’s very rare that they are spoken to as human beings.”[/blockquote]


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Steve Hall
Contributor
Steve Hall is a marketing professional, publisher, writer, community manager, photographer and all-around lover of advertising.

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