Nike Running Brazil faces a big challenge: make running even more attractive to a younger audience. To achieve that, Nike has been promoting running events that are more social and fun to young athletes. In November 2013, one of these events happened in Rio and our challenge was to increase the number of participants and create an even more joyful experience to increase their interest for running. Knowing that young Brazilians are very attached to social networks (95% of them are active on Facebook), we had the necessity to create a running experience that would go digital.

To runners, we were able to raise interest in participating in the event and promoted a true social and fun running experience. To runners' community of friends, we created awareness and increased their interest for running. To the brand, we created a perception of innovation at the physical and digital world. We translated this human behavior into technology, and that’s why it was so easy for runners to understand the whole idea. The interaction with High-Five to Share motivated runners and the posts shared on Facebook were relevant to their friends.

By observing runners we had this insight: we realized that they high-five to communicate and to cheer on. We perceived that high-fiving translates the act of running into happiness and pride. So we designed an equipment that mirrored the same behavior, by letting the runners high-five different big yellow hands along the race and share their emotions with friends. Each runner could express their excitement before the race start, their level of physical effort on the last mile and their pride of finishing the race.

The race sold out one month before the event. 12,000 runners attended. 166% increase compared to previous year. During the race people got crazy about high-fiving. 4519 runners participated. They generated 8876 high-fives, which was all relevant content. Each high-five got an average of 40 Likes or comments, which was like having 40 friends cheering for each runner. The total direct interactions from friends on Facebook was 356,234 and the organic reach was 2,952,812. But above all, it was an extraordinary experience for Rio 10k runners that have showed that running can actually be fun and social.