Run Easy

Reebok

Brief as received

We have sold a lot of “NFL Apparel,” but not a lot of “our stuff” and our female customer is gravitating toward Nike.

We have a single running shoe that is getting good reviews and want to feature it for next season.

How can Reebok standout to 16-24 year old customers, through running next year?

Research & Insights

Global research across 10 markets unsurprisingly showed running was not very popular with 16-24 year olds, but running shoes were the most popular shoes to wear in daily life.

There were very different perceptions of Reebok across markets, but the main take away from research wasn’t about Reebok - it was about Nike.

The target group of found Nike intimidating, inflexible and not how they saw themselves.

The insight was an opportunity to amplify contrast with increasingly out-of-touch category performance messages.

Re-framed brief

How can Reebok highlight the absurdity and unrealistic judgement of Nike and the rest of the running category?

How can we define our brand in contrast to the catagory to prompt a “re-evaluation” of the Reebok brand?

How can we create a counter-culture movement?

Sharpened audience definition

Start the work of “winning the next customer.”

Make an impression on the new generation of up-coming 16-19 year olds.

This is the only way to generate momentum for the brand in the next couple of years when Reebok has new product.

Problem identified

Reebok used to be a brand with big opinions on things like street-ball, hip hop, sky surfing and parkour, but now had lost its edge.

Reebok didn’t have an opinion that differentiated it from Nike, UnderArmor, etc… and it needed one.

Insight that shed new light

Sports science - “running harder is not better.”

The industry had been pushing the image of the solo athlete making twisted faces and grunting, but the most “productive” way to run is to not be out-of-breath.

The simplest way to test your running pace is talking. If you can carry a conversation while running, you’re at the right speed.

“Running at the speed of chat” was smart, social and fun.

Marketplace & cultural understanding

Global youth culture is built around fitting in with friends and fitting into their favorite jeans, not lone-wolf performance. Millennial life was about individuality and they wanted a brand that fits personal goals.

This belief system mirrored life as they joined social networks in record numbers to connect to like-minded people.

A new way of thinking about the product or brand

Fitness could be social. We thought about the brand as a “network” anyone could join to share runs, recruit others to join them or find inspiration and support if they chose to run alone.

Reebok could inspire and enable people to have fun with others, through running.

Work the brief inspired

“Run Easy”

We started out to create a global advertising campaign based on the question, “What are you just doing?” but ended up creating a Running Social Network and a “Movement.”

RunEasy launched in fifteen countries, across OOH, TV, digital and mobile, but at its core we built a dynamic running social network, anyone could join and use on their mobile device.

To promote it, large scale out-of-home appeared as “typical running imagery,” then “graffiti-ed over” with our “impossible-to-ignore” city-specific messages.

The call-to-join Run Easy, was shot with global athletes like Allen Iverson, Thierry Henry and Venus Williams running while chatting with friends. We “reassembled” cuts from those conversations into a single “entertaining conversation” that stretched from Mumbai to Stockholm to Los Angeles.

The Run Easy Service was a social network built on HTML5 + AJAX for planning, recording, posting and talking about running.

The “Create” section was a first of its kind google maps integration that enabled people to map out runs, pin images to them and share them. The “where” section was a run finder. The “Hear” section was an iTunes integration that enabled playlist sharing for specific runs. The “Talk” section was a running feed of Texts sent from runners while running. There were also running groups that connected to Facebook and a video editor to recut the Run Easy spot into whatever version you wanted.

Results

During the four month campaign Reebok.com traffic tripled, sales goals of KFS+ running shoe over-delivered and we saw compounding weekly growth of RUN EASY runs added, “check-ins,” images added and texts sent.

The real results came over the next eight months. After media budget ran out there continued to be compounding growth of the RUN EASY network and it spread from fifteen countries to almost eighty and 10,906 runs. It wasn’t a campaign, it was a “branded utility” and people were using it, sharing it and adding value to it long after our advertising ended.

"RUN EASY" won multiple Cannes Lions and was Adweek's Media Plan of the Year.