Baloise – an insurance company – is the sponsor of Nina Derwael, the Olympic Champion in Gymnastics, and of Gymfed, the overarching federation of the gym clubs. In October 2023 the World Championship Gymnastics was held in Antwerp. But Nina fell out – last minute – because of an injury. The perfect timing to celebrate the resilience of Nina as a professional athlete.

• Brief

How can we leverage the sponsorship of Nina before and during the World Championship to raise awareness for the brand by interacting with customers, prospects and brokers.

• Objectives 

Brand building and raising awareness for the mission of our client: “we insure what inspires you”.

Baloise is the sponsor of Nina Derwael. Nina is a famous Belgian athlete with an Olympic gold medal in Gymnastics. She was one of the main contenders of the 2023 World Championship Gymnastics, to be held in Antwerp, before falling out with a serious injury. The whole country was gutted because of this news and is following her recovery with great interest. Of course, being an insurance company, for Baloise it was very clear that even in times of trouble we stand behind her and give her the full support she needs.

On the other hand, Baloise is also sponsoring Gymfed, the national federation for more than 300 gym and athletic clubs. Combined, they count over 120.000 amateur athletes doing sports, having fun and dreaming about accomplishing what Nina Derwael did before them. The aim is to get even more youngsters to join those clubs and try this beautiful sport.

Not applicable. Campaign was done in English.

The portrait is a fabulous piece of dot art where each dot is in fact a little plaster. Each plaster stands for every time things didn’t go so well for Nina. They symbolize each failure and bump in the road. But in the end, it’s all those failures and hard lessons that turned Nina into the Champion she is today.

We worked with an artist - Puncheur - that specializes in dot art. A foto shoot was organized, we took a picture of Nina in the correct pose. Software translated this picture to dots. The circumference of the dots was printed very lightly on the 35m2 billboard. Every plaster was stuck by hand on the billboard by a team of artists. Where the picture was darker, more dots were needed. Like that we were able to create depth in the portrait, resulting in a 35m2 piece of art.