As we’ve found in our latest report, when it comes to sports and fitness in advertising, what happens outside of competition has become as important as what happens on the field, in the pool or on the track these days.
While sports champions remain a fixture of advertising, the brand stories they help to tell have changed dramatically. As Taylor Gessel of General Mills, Wheaties’ parent company says, the brand “has reserved its boxes for champions who use their sports platforms for something greater”. Two years of on-again, off-again lockdowns has made us more conscious than ever of our own vulnerability, so perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise. We continue to thrill to breathtaking moments of endurance and skill but more than ever, we also want the back story. We want to be inspired by the human – the bumps along the road, the little wins, the defeats and the triumphs.
It’s hard to have a conversation about sports and fitness in advertising without mentioning giants like Nike and adidas. And they (rightly) feature prominently in these pages, having been the source of some of the truly great advertising of the last few decades. However, we hope you’ll also enjoy being reminded of the variety of brands using sports and fitness as a powerful visual shorthand. Using themes of strength, endurance and ‘winning against the odds’ in advertising can help us tell powerful stories, connect people with a brand’s values and, of course, to buy their stuff, whether it’s the latest high-end training equipment, a refreshing beer, or energy packed breakfast cereal.
We’ve trawled Lürzer’s Archive for the best work drawing on sports and fitness from the last ten years and we also spoke to people behind the last few years’ most interesting print, online, social media and TV campaigns that position sports and fitness at the heart of our lives.
What's next?
We are seeing no end of creative uses of sports and fitness in advertising.
How it gets in front of consumers continues to evolve. With the era of the metaverse upon us, is there still a role for more traditional channels? “Of course, traditional media won’t be as dominant as it was, but I don’t think we should write it off just yet,” says Owen Lee. “Sport provides us with peak moments when we all come together for big events. Broadcast media is good at that. Billboards are perhaps the last real broadcast medium that everyone experiences and the Super Bowl proves that ads can be as much a sport, as the sport itself.”
Bennett-Grant’s focus is on Web3. “We’re all trying to crack stakeholder fandom,” he says. “We interviewed the founder of NFT FC, an Australian community platform, which allows fans to have a stake in up and coming young footballers careers. So, through this NFT community platform, you can help fundraise and then you’ll have a stake in that player’s future.” According to Bennett-Grant lots of brands are looking at closely at this, so agencies would be wise to get on board.
For Ledesma, it still comes back to ideas. She says, “There will always be a need for traditional channels and even with emerging platforms, the challenge still remains: how do we cut through the clutter with a unique POV and storytelling that goes beyond being your best and giving it your all?”
Our job in advertising is to stand out whatever the medium. It feels like many marketeers have forgotten this.
Tony Davidson, ex-Global Partner and ECD, Wieden+Kennedy
From icons to humans
Four-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka and Olympic gymnast Simone Biles have earned their place in the record books.
While doing so, they have also helped to set a new standard for athletes by sharing their vulnerability with fans.
The role of tech and data
Since FitBits hit the market in 2009, we’ve gotten used to data capturing our every movement, right down to our heartbeats. As we see athletes turn up in the latest cutting edge gear at major sporting events, ad campaigns are also making use of the latest technology to find creative ways to connect with audiences.
Jose Ramirez, says, “At every sporting event, there are hundreds of pieces of technology capturing the athlete’s biometrics, crowd noise levels, and everything else in between. You can argue that even the photographs that journalists take are pieces of data.”
Diversity – in front of and behind the camera
At the time of writing, a Sunday night TV commercial was spotted touting an upcoming ‘men’s football’ game.
Not so long ago, ‘football’ meant men were playing unless ‘women’s’ was tagged on. Campaigns increasingly reflect the rich mix of people participating in sport – whether that’s by gender, ethnicity, ability, body shape or life stage – but they also show a wider range of activities.
OUR THANKS TO
Alex Bennett-Grant, Founder, We Are Pi;
Tony Davidson, ex-Global Partner and ECD, Wieden+Kennedy;
Mary Beth Ledesma, Group Creative Director, Droga5;
Owen Lee, Chief Creative Officer, FCB Inferno;
Becky McOwen-Banks, Executive Creative Director, Vayner Media;
Jeffrey Schermer + Jose Ramirez, Associate Creative Director, GUT Miami;
Nick Steel, Founder, Harriman Steel.
