Italy has a specific and significant problem with its perception of sportswomen. 

They are rarely seen or celebrated. When they are, they’re stereotyped, sexualised and objectified. So much so that football pundit Fulvio Collovati claimed on national TV that women cannot “speak about tactics” since a woman “doesn’t understand tactics like a man”. Yes, in 2019. 

In Milan – a key Nike city – 55% of women between 14 and 24 don’t do any sport at all. Why would they, when female sporting heroes are either invisible, objectified or vilified as unfeminine?

Nike challenged us to get 150,000 young Milanese women moving by using social, in a way that would cement the brand’s status as the champion of women in sport – on every level. Nike wanted a campaign that would not only be talked about and engaged with, but would also create real-world action with far-reaching effects. 

Creative idea

The social media video app TikTok has taken over the internet, surpassing all other downloads and acquiring more than 500 million active monthly users. It’s a phenomenon, encouraging users to post footage of themselves performing and often handing the baton to their followers to follow suit. 

In Milan, and across the globe, young women are embracing the app to learn complex dance routines and post their work. This campaign saw Italy’s biggest sporting heroines teaching four young women – Milan’s biggest TikTok superstars – key moves and techniques. 

Together, fully choreographed dance/sport hybrids were created and put out to the world via TikTok. Millions of followers watched the routines, and Milananes females responded with their own take.  This campaign was about getting young Milanese woman to learn new sports, through the prism of their current social behaviours – dance challenges. 

Strategy 

The target audience is women aged 15 to 24 in Milan. In all studies (including our own), it was suggested this group spent the majority of their free time on their phone – but this wasn’t just passive scrolling.  

A new social currency had developed alongside the rise of a new social platform - TikTok. Young women were challenging one another to perform intricate dance routines. And they were taking up the challenge, in their thousands.

We realised we'd been guilty of looking through the Nike lens of what "sport" meant, not what it meant to our audience. To get young women applying their abilities to "sport" as we saw it, Nike needed to tap into the spirit of fun and connection Milanese women were finding in TikTok dance routines.

The execution 

First came the athletes. In December, Nike recruited three incredible sportswomen – strong, high-achieving athletes who are leaders in their fields – basketball star Olbis Futo Andrè, Juventus player Benedetta Glionna and champion boxer Federica Monacelli. We then signed up four TikTok megastars – teens with a combined following of more than 11 million, each known for performing and perfecting dance routines on the platform. 

For the next few weeks, each athlete was teamed up with an influencer to devise dance routines based on impressive sporting skills, like #basketbeat, a complex yet addictive basketball routine. 

Our TikTok ‘Musers’ then put the routines out to their audiences, performing their complex sport/dance hybrids and encouraging followers to do the same.

Results

100M+ views and 540K+ likes views for the three challenges, with 20M+ #basketbeat views in just 36 hours, and an engagement rate that was double the TikTok benchmark. More than 46k user-generated routines were posted in response.

Over 300 articles have been written about our campaign, for a readership of more than 600 million. That includes our athletes appearing on the cover of Corriere della Sera, one of the most conservative papers in Milan. Sky Sports – alongside numerous other news outlets – has aired features on our campaign. We started 150k+ specific conversations around our campaign and our athletes.

We drove engagement on our owned channels, too – with NikePlus membership numbers growing and a quickly shrinking gender gap. Milan has become the fastest-growing city in Nike’s EMEA region, as more young women see ‘Nulla Puo Fermarci’ as a way into sport.