For more than 50 years, Les Mills has been helping people make more joyful fitness choices. They invented group fitness with music and choreography – with classes like BodyPump and BodyCombat – and they have spent reinventing fitness classes in a way that turned them into New Zealand and Australia’s most iconic fitness brand.

But elsewhere, almost no one had heard of them. In America, one of the biggest group fitness markets in the world, they had just 5% unaided awareness. So they needed a way to turn heads and break into the oversaturated American fitness market.

We worked with a director known for their ability to build absurd worlds, who could bring the story to life through the lens of an epic sports commercial with an unexpected twist. Someone who understood sports advertising enough to spoof it. They took each scene and pushed it to the next limit of absurdity to make the viewer truly relieved once we exited fitness hell. They worked closely with Brett Goldstein to guide and build the story and character arch needed to make fitness feel more joyful. We took cues from the cliches of fitness advertising to make this playfully poignant message.