45% of girls drop out of sport due to low body confidence. Dove and Nike created the Body Confident Sport program to tackle the main reason they drop out at the root cause, to help girls stay in sport and feeling good about themselves.

The brief was to first announce the partnership of these two huge brands, before launching the initiative to as many parents as possible, and as many school sports coaches as we could. We were then tasked with rolling out the message at a more personal and empathetic level showing real girls with the own real body hang-ups.

To make parents and guardians aware of the program which was being delivered to girls through their school coaches.

Based on the strategic insight that “45% of girls drop out of sport due to low body confidence”, the creative idea was to empower girls by providing everyone they encountered with one phrase they could keep at the forefront of their mind, almost as a mission statement. This came to life through the hashtag #KeepHerConfident. It reminded everyone to be hyper-aware of how they talk about their body around young girls in a sport setting, how they coach young girls, and how girls react to each other while doing sport.

#KeepHerConfident was central to the Dove & Nike partnership announcement, and accompanied every communication created for the campaign, from the launch film which aired at the Super Bowl, right through to the ecosystem of our targeted social campaign.

Understanding that it isn’t only mothers that play a part in a girl’s athletic experience, For the first time, Dove Masterbrand widened their traditional paid target audience beyond women, . incorporating “Girl Dads” and coaches into the fold through our targeting strategy.

We used a multi-channel approach to strengthen brand power and drive saliency. The campaign launched at the Super Bowl, where we had a dedicated audience of sports fans and parents. Post-game strategy was essential to extend and reinforce the message immediately after increasing both long-term brand power, and short-term impact on sales of key products. We tapped into other sports related cultural moments, like ‘March Madness’ in 2024 that were relevant to the target audience & message. Throughout the campaign, we identified areas where consumers could experience deeper storytelling and get involved by cultivating a two-way conversation with the brand.

To begin we created a 6” teaser asset to announce the DovexNike partnership, with the Body Confident Sport program then officially launched via in-person event at Nike headquarters in New York, featuring sports star Venus Williams. From this event social content was shared to create a groundswell of support for the program. The ‘Hard Knocks’ film followed, launching at the most-watched Super Bowl game ever (123.7 million viewers).

From this spark, we secured high-impact placements for Dove’s messaging on social platforms to drive post-game conversation around the shocking dropout statistic. The #KeepHerConfident hashtag was used as the call-to-action for spreading Dove’s mission at scale. In parallel, we partnered with audio leader Pandora/SiriusXM and a female-founded sports platform, Togethxr, to share stories from female athletes and self-proclaimed “Girl Dad” sports podcasters. This added a new dimension to the hero film and provided a platform for real women to share their stories.

Since launching the #KeepHerConfident campaign we’ve garnered an unprecedented 19.1 billion earn impressions via 2,481 pieces of coverage across 8 different engagement tactics. The campaign has secured over 229 broadcast segments, with a total positive sentiment of 98%. We have seen incredible interaction with the campaign through high-profile partners like Venus Williams and Kylie Kelce, with thousands of girls, parents and coaches praising the campaign and sharing our assets with their followers across social media. We also enjoyed shout outs from a host of sporting stars, as well as TV host Jimmy Fallon and Senator Raumesh Akbari. Furthermore, our activity was widely shared by parents and coaches many of who related personally to the struggles young girls are facing today. We outperformed the campaign’s impressions KPI’s target by 448%. And most importantly, we are on track to coach 1 million girls in 2024, which we should achieve annually going forward.