For this campaign, we were tasked to introduce the newly designed football kit as well as to create an athlete focused content to amplify the excitement for the upcoming Women’s World Cup 2023.

In South Korea, however, there still exists a huge gender inequality especially when it comes to sports. For example, most schools don’t have sports teams for girls.

The goal of the campaign was to make these female football players names household names, championing them by creating new and bold narratives to build them from athletes into cultural icons.

Inspired by films such as Ocean’s 8, our work focused on the playful quality of a “heist” combined with football. In South Korea, women’s football is not as popular and as recognized as the men’s team.

Through the playful, cheeky, and bold confidence our Korean National Women’s football team already exhibits, we portrayed them as heroines ready take on the world-stage heist of the World Cup. To add cultural intrigue and credibility, the campaign featured a detective —actor Lee Je-hoon—as the centerpiece of their ongoing investigation. Toward the end of this three-part series, as Lee Je-hoon investigates the heist heroines, he becomes a fan and stans for the team by donning his own newly released team uniform.

Diving into the history of the Women’s Football Team in South Korea (KNT) unveiled a myriad of challenges that stood against the women’s team. Young girls lacked football clubs to play within while the highest professional leagues continued to train in a non-existent professional league. All of this highlighting a longstanding history where women were excluded from the sport.

Despite these challenges, the KNT transformed their obstacle into fuel. Their unwavering perseverance led them to rank in the Top #15 worldwide, become the all-time top goal scorer nationally, and even appear in the World Cup for 4 consecutive years.

On the field, they unlock something that goes against reason. Fear turns into confidence, hardship turns into motivation, failure turns into potential, showing women in Korea that strength can come from within. Standing beside them, Nike used this as an opportunity to hero a group of athletes that defied all odds.

Across owned social (Instagram) alone, our work reached up to 419K organic views on a single episode at its peak, while many people engaged in the comment section, reacting to the cheekiness of the athletes playing the role in the Heist as well as the Netflix actor Lee Je-hoon’s infamous detective role and persona. Additionally, some comments reacting to the posts supported these women: “I’m rooting for you. I hope you will succeed without any injury… go Korea. I love you.”

Starting from a place with little to no recognition from the Korean public, the engagement on social and in the comments section proved that they were getting noticed - accomplishing the goal of making their names as household names.