The fact that our relationship with exercise fluctuates was the key behaviour that we wanted to address with this activation. We understood that women go through phases where their confidence dips, their fear of judgement rears its head, and they fall out of exercise. We wanted to address this universal experience.

Whatever media we used to tackle this, had to empower women with confidence, but also needed to de-dramatise when women have periods of inactivity. We wanted them to understand that this is a normal occurrence, whilst inspiring them to pick back up their trainers.

So how do you figure out when women are struggling to keep up with their regular physical activity? Quite simply really. We realised there was one very common behaviour that indicated when women were exercising: they put their headphones in, press play, and get in the zone. When this behaviour stopped, we would know when to take action.

To bring this to life, we worked with Spotify and used their data in a way that had never been done before. Spotify helped us identify all workout playlists on their platform, whether they were curated by Spotify themselves, their users, or even by other brands. We then looked at the listeners. Any woman who had been listening to these playlists, but had lapsed over the past 30 days or more, was shown our This Girl Can campaign.

We reached over a quarter of a million women across the UK who’d taken time off physical activity, sponsoring their listening session and taking over their desktops with our brand film to inspire them to dust off their workout playlist and get moving.

Did that encourage them? This media buy and data usage, which had never been attempted before, made our message so relevant and compelling that we beat the Spotify benchmarks for engagement 5 times over.

Thousands of women even temporarily dropped their listening session to visit the This Girl Can site and find out how they could get active. As a result of the overall campaign, nearly one in two women (49%) took action, growing the ranks of our phenomenal women, one beat at a time.