Situation: In 2022 adidas recognized that women still faced major cultural and systemic challenges that limit their participation in sport.

Brief: Drive consideration for adidas in sports amongst women, through the lens of impossible is nothing attitude.

Objective: Increase perception of adidas as a sports brand for women in the context of running.

The overwhelming consensus of the all-female led team was that women were facing a ridiculous reality when going out for a run, and it needed to change. The idea would need to do more than passively talk about safety and highlight women’s realities, but take action to create change

We created the “The ridiculous run”. We launched with a film of a night run produced in two cities, with two female runners, and a full motorcade with a bold statement: Feeling safe shouldn't look this ridiculous. From wearing one headphone, to an all-out protective crew made up by horse-riding cowgirls, motorcycle riders and a fleet of running bodyguards – we showed what it took to make women feel safe, and labeled it “ridiculous”. The striking film was designed to make people question what a ‘safe’ run looks like and invite them to help change the ridiculous reality with allyship tools.

Running should be the most accessible pursuit of sport for all, but this wasn’t true for women who felt unsafe to run alone. Through social listening, we found that almost half of social conversations around women’s running was related to safety, but the real shocker came with the results from the research conducted with 9,000 male and female runners across nine countries. The research revealed not only that 92% of women felt concern for their safety, but even worse, only 18% of men believe they have a responsibility to help women feel safer. When we looked at the global media narrative, we saw why, the world was making safety women’s problem, and women were taking the onus of responsibility, sharing advice and tips on how to stay safe on social media. This revealed our challenge – to create a provocative campaign to raise awareness and take action to change attitudes.

The campaign was executed through a film, social content, which would raise awareness of the problem and drive people to allyship tools and programs by adidas to help create change.

To create impact we wanted to show the reality of every woman and so commissioned a global research study to truly understand every experience. The film visualizes and brings the findings to life, highlighting a variety of ridiculous realities that women must implement when they run to stay safe.

The film was launched without a paid media strategy to drive reach because we wanted the idea to be strong enough to travel on its own. As well as the film, we created press packs and social content to help the world understand why we had created the campaign. In addition, we used our running communities to educate others, shared allyship tools, and activated over 129 running partners around the world.

Success for us was creating impact around the issue as it manifests in running, and to amplify initiatives among running communities to meaningfully address both understanding of the issue and encourage change.

There’s obviously marketing impact of likes (156K) and views (2M) but The Ridiculous Run is about something much bigger than just a campaign with campaign metrics.

In one month, the campaign’s minisite (hosting the allyship tools), has seen 1.5million visits and 88,000 people have completed the White Ribbon pledge to never commit, condone, or remain silent about violence against women - almost doubling the number of pledges made since that start of 2022.

In addition, adidas has started to shift the media narrative from telling women how to run safe and victim blaming, to telling the world that women’s safety isn’t just a women’s problem with 540 pieces of PR coverage across high reach titles.