Elite Turkish Coffee has been the sponsor of the country's biggest cycling event 'Sovev Turki' for years. But while most of us take riding a bike for granted, it might come as a surprise that many people (adults not kids!) don’t know how to ride a bike.

In fact, in the US 6% of people don’t know how to ride a bike (YouGov “Bikes & Edward Snowden” Survey 2013). In the UK 13% of people don’t know how to ride a bike (The British Heart Foundation Survey 2017). In Israel although there are no official numbers, many people have friends who don’t know how to ride.

To Elite Turkish Coffee, Israel's leading coffee brand and one of the country’s most inclusive brands - this was simply unacceptable. So they decided to do something about it and purposely invited to the event those who couldn’t take part in it. Yet

Elite Turkish Coffee has been the sponsor of the country's biggest cycling event 'Sovev Turki' for years. But while most of us take riding a bike for granted, it might come as a surprise that many people (adults not kids!) don’t know how to ride a bike. (6% US, 12.5% UK)

To Elite Turkish Coffee, Israel's leading coffee brand and one of the country’s most inclusive brands - this was simply unacceptable. So they decided to do something about it and CREATED A BIKING SCHOOL a biking school so everyone could join in the fun.

Instead of creating another campaign we created an entertaining experience and opened a biking school, where everyone was invited to challenge their fears because it’s never be too late to enjoy something

Admitting you don’t know how to ride a bike, when you’re an adult and riding is considered a kids’ skill usually acquired during childhood, is embarrassing.

To address the issue, we needed to deflate the problem by outing it – publicly. But not by putting people to shame – they felt enough of that by themselves – rather by painting the range of very human and understandable reasons some people never acquire the skill or even in some cases loose it.

The only way people would feel comfortable enough to go for our biking classes, would be by creating a feeling of comfort in the fact they were not alone – many others don’t know how to ride (security of numbers). We needed to give whatever reason they had for not knowing how to bike legitimacy. Our appeal would have to be emotional and spark not only sympathy but empathy&identification.

To launch our initiative, we created a short documentary that outed the phenomenon & followed the learning process of a few people who’d never ridden a bike: People like Doron, a 61-year-old photographer, Brachi a once Ultra-Orthodox Jew and Dvir, a young guy who recovered from a coma after being hit by a mortar shell during his army service.

But we didn’t stop there. Ahead of the event (28.09.18) we aired an integrated campaign nationwide with the stories of our heroes and a call for people to come learn how to bike.

Learning being our main objective, we also created a series online biking tutorials from which people could learn how to ride and even teach their children.

Lastly, we set up a biking school in Rabin Square the heart of Tel-Aviv with private instructors where people could sign up for classes and learn how to ride for free

• The press amplified our call.

• Morning & evening news broadcasts covered our initiative.

• Over 30.000 people used our riding tips and more than 1 million watched them

• Consumers pushed for action as many people urged their friends and family to sign-up for our biking school

• Hundreds signed-up from all over Israel for our classes

• This massive response convinced the Tel-Aviv city council to create an additional 5 kilometers track just for beginners

All this so our beginners could join the thousands of people who took part in the 'Sovev Turki' event and never have to make up another excuse about why they can’t ride. Because there's no such thing as too late to enjoy.