FCB Inferno Prove ‘This Girl Can’ Again

Two years after Sport England and FCB Inferno’s This Girl Can ad encouraged millions of women to get into sport, the original team has teamed up again for a new campaign aiming to change women’s fear of judgement.

Again directed by Kim Gehrig of Somesuch, the new ad, entitled Phenomenal Women, features more women taking on a whole new variety of sports, accompanied by Maya Angelou reading her poem of the same name over a new score that is a hugh-hush collaboration with Gossip lead singer Beth Ditto.

‘In the first ad, there were obvious sports we had to feature, like running, swimming, football,’ said FCB Inferno managing director Sharon Jiggins, ‘in this ad, we had a bit more freedom to show lots of activities, things people may not have done in school’.

These less conventional sports also feature in social content videos that focus on cast members of the main ad in more detail, produced in-house at FCB Inferno. For example, in Lydia vs Wheels, which will appear on the This Girl Can site and on their Facebook page, we see members of a women’s roller derby teams, a sport that Sport England kept coming across time and time again in their research of this second ad. Other sports featuring are martial arts, weightlifting, and an exercise classes that sees new mothers using their newborns as weights. But in a cute way rather than the babies hanging off of dumbbells image you may currently have in your head.

The new TV commercial and social content are also joined by billboards that rolled out a few weeks ago. These include a few images that will be used nationally, such as one of a hijab-clad kickboxer with the slogan ‘a kick right in the stereotypes’, but will also include digital billboards that have more community focused images created by women themselves using the This Girl Can app.