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.

Nike gets female sporting superheroes leading the way in Italian sport to teach young, Milanese TikTok megastars (with a combined following of 11m+) a thing or two – namely signature moves and sporting skills from the fields of basketball, football and boxing.

The TikTok ‘Musers’ – the platform’s own name for an influencer – then demo their new skills and challenge their millions of followers to do the same. The campaign triggers a series of TikTok dance challenges, with choreography rooted in sports maneuvers designed by our sportswomen.

It encourages the female population of Milan to have a go at something new, posting the results and inspiring each other to follow suit.

Our research suggested that women felt well-intended empowerment messaging from sport brands was condescending. So what was the right message for 2019?

In Milan, we asked our audience an important question – if they weren’t playing sport, what were they doing? The stats told us they spent most time on social media. But further exploration showed they weren't wasting time with passive scrolling.

A new social currency had developed alongside the rise of 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 replicate the spirit of fun and connectivity that Milanese women were finding in TikTok dance routines.

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, with 46.7k pieces of UGC created as a result.

Reach + Engagement:

We earned 100m+ views and 540k+ likes for the three challenges, with 20m+ #basketbeat views in just 36 hours. 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. And 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 it as a way into sport.