Our audience insight showed that our target audience of young, active, urbanites see exercise as having a very real purpose, rather than being frivolous fun. These achievers are on a quest for continuous self-improvement, and we associated New Balance with this by providing the tailored motivation and expert knowledge to help them achieve their goals. These athletes are also increasingly indifferent towards traditional advertising so it was not going to be easy.

This led to the creation of the “My Toughest Opponent” campaign. Underpinned by our insights, we set out to use digital media to inspire our audience of metropolitan athletes to believe in their ability, pushing themselves to be harder, faster, stronger. Because after all, our toughest competition is with ourselves.

Just two weeks after planning on this new client began, our hero video featuring our five athletes launched with a Promoted Trend igniting interest. We used FirstView, a first in the sportswear category, to secure the first video advert for all Twitter users – achieving upwards of a million views in 24 hours.

Using Facebook & Instagram we sequenced creative delivery through each month, securing a frequency of adverts against our audience – allowing us to tell our athlete stories with fresh content.

Ending the campaign, we used a second Promoted Trend with conversational FirstView to drive engagement with our aware and receptive audience.

In another sportswear category first, users engaging with one of four hashtags were treated to a tweet reply from New Balance with a version of the video that dynamically pulled in their name and photo. The audience loved it. Personalisation at a scale never seen before.

Our video content amassed more than 14.5 million views, and the campaign also achieved 25,000 uses of our hashtag #iamthecompetition.

There were 325,000 engagements on New Balance ambassador platforms, and 132 million impressions across all social media.

Our content also resulted into an increase in sales - 190,000 website click throughs during the campaign resulted in over a 53% increase in e-commerce sales.

Crucially, our campaign had highest levels awareness amongst our target audience of metropolitan athletes – proof that we reached the right people, at the right time, in the right way.

The brand study showed that our target audience are now more likely to associate New Balance with being premium and desirable, and we have created the start of something new for the brand.