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.

In the film, we watch TV’s most notoriously grumpy athlete, Brett Goldstein AKA Roy Kent from “Ted Lasso”, as he goes through fitness Hell to find fitness Heaven, in the form of a joyful Les Mills fitness class in the rolling greenery of New Zealand.

The film begins in the dark world that audiences have come to expect from the fitness world – pain, sacrifice, and voiceover that narrates what we must overcome to achieve fitness results.

As the film progresses, Brett’s unhinged workout regimen becomes more grueling and torturous.

Just as Brett is about to reach his breaking point, his “workout” is interrupted by New Zealand Māori comedian Acushla-Tara Kupe, who invites him out of his fitness Hell and into a more joyful way to work out. Our grumpy hero is even caught cracking a smile.

It ends by inviting our audience to choose a workout they’ll actually enjoy.

The ultimate goal was exposing more people to all that Les Mills has to offer. U.S. brand awareness increased by 74% from 5% to 8.4% in the three months after the campaign launched.

On the day of launch there was a spike of 104,000+ profile views of the @LesMills Instagram page along with our launch film reaching 866,000 people who weren’t previously following Les Mills.

Of the brand's 50+ year history, the Choose Happy launch was the highest organic reaching brand communication in their brand’s history.