Tokyo 2020 was a premiere in Olympic history. For the first time, as many female as male athletes were chasing the medals. Sounds like women in sports finally get the attention they deserve. Quite the opposite. Besides during the Olympic Games, the inequality in German sports media reporting is still tremendous. While male athletes get 90% of the coverage, women get only 10%! This comes with far-reaching consequences: less attention means less revenue from sponsors and less idols for girls in youth sports – and it even gives a distorted image of women in our society.

Team Germany and the DOSB were determined to make a statement against this inequality and tasked us to come up with an idea to involve the community and spark a conversation.

90% of sports media coverage is for male athletes, only 10% is for females – what a sad statistic.

Sad, but still a statistic – abstract numbers in a dry bar chart.

So, to really grab the attention of the community, we turned those figures into a more striking and engaging visualization: two socks being worn at uneven heights, which represents the statistic in a distinctive and sports-related way. It is a symbol for the inequality in sports media reporting – combined with a hashtag as our clear call: #ShowUsEqual.

In order to give our initiative the biggest platform, we published it shortly before the Olympic Games in Tokyo – a time when media coverage was at its peak.

We created a symbol that captivated with its simplicity ¬– eye-catching for the media to pick up and easy for the community to turn into own content. To spark the conversation, we teamed up with German sports stars and influencers. With their publicity, we could activate our main protagonists and target group to join our movement: all those hardworking female athletes around the country who aren’t in the spotlight yet – those who can authentically claim: #ShowUsEqual.

The campaign kicked off with an open letter to the German media outlets we claimed had equal sports reporting for female athletes. Then, we sent out our socks embedded in a specially designed #ShowUsEqual packaging to Team Germany athletes and several sports influencers. The status quo was on the outside, the aspired goal on the inside.

They made their “sock statements” on their social media channels and asked the community to join the movement. Athletes from all sports participated, creators produced content, fans shared our hashtag, and even several leading social scientists supported our call.

The outcome? Well, it knocked our socks off!

#ShowUsEqual was one of the most talked-about sports topics in Germany.

Sports-savvy influencers and athletes from a wide range of disciplines – from gold-medal winners to amateur athletes – supported the campaign.

With a budget of 4,000 euros, we achieved 2.8 million impressions on Instagram and around 25 times more comments on the DOSB Instagram channel than the previous average.