#ThisGirlCan Campaign Inspires Women To Wiggle & Jiggle With Pride & Purpose

Sport England, a government agency tasked with convincing women to exercise, has launched This Girl Can, a campaign to “inspire women to wiggle, jiggle, move and prove that judgment is a barrier that can be overcome.”

The campaign, created by FCB Inferno, is based on research that found 2 million fewer women than men are regularly exercising despite the finding that 75% of women age 14 to 40 stating they’d like to exercise.

Of the campaign’s approach, Sport England CEO Jennie Price said, [blockquote] “Any woman will tell you about the internal dialog that goes on in her head, particularly when she thinks about sport, exercise and getting fit. It’s stuff like ‘I’m too fat to do this’ or ‘I’m not fit enough to go to that class’, or ‘If I get on that treadmill and press that button and fall off, I’m going to look really stupid and everybody is going to stare at me, and I’m certainly not going to wear those clothes to do it’. We are trying to say it’s perfectly normal to feel like that, don’t beat yourself up about it.”[/blockquote]

To convey the notion that exercise is, indeed, normal for all women and not just those perfectly shaped Olympic athlete types, the organization connected with seven women to highlight their lives and their relationships with exercise.

The campaign includes a video, which is also airing as a TV commercial, in which the seven women go about their exercise routines while statements including, “I jiggle therefore I am”, “Sweating like a pig,” “Feeling like a fox,” “I kick balls, deal with it” and “Damn right I look hot” are overlaid:

http://youtu.be/aN7lt0CYwHg

Since launch January 12, the video has been viewed over 518,000 times, 8,000 of those views in the time it took to write this article.

Accompanying the video is a microsite on which each of the women have an extended personal profile in video format. (They can also be viewed on the campaign’s YouTube page.) The site also contains a section where anyone can dig into hundreds of forms of exercise, get an overview of that specific exercise, how much it might cost and find out how to begin.

In addition, there is a socially-fueled section of the site entitled “Feel Inspired” where social content tagged with the campaign’s hashtag, #ThisGirlCan, is pulled from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Vine, YouTube and Google+.

The campaign’s Twitter account, which has 18,8000 followers, is promoting the campaign:

Our Zumba girls don't mind if they sweat because they love how they feel #thisgirlcan pic.twitter.com/to2qJowL1S

— This Girl Can (@ThisGirlCanUK) January 14, 2015

If you missed our 90sec film on TV, here it is again in all its jiggly, sweaty glory
http://t.co/VbBHQRObX0 What do you think? #thisgirlcan

— This Girl Can (@ThisGirlCanUK) January 12, 2015

The campaign even thanked Missy Elliott, who lent her song, Get Ur Freak On, to the campaign for mentioning the ad on Twitter:

Thanks for the retweet, @MissyElliott! Safe to say you've made half of UK get their freak on…#thisgirlcan pic.twitter.com/laaa2GivTQ

— This Girl Can (@ThisGirlCanUK) January 13, 2015

The campaign’s Facebook page, which has 43,485 likes, is promoting the campaign:

And, they’re working their Instagram account, as well:
[instagram]http://instagram.com/p/xw6VL9usH4/embed/[/instagram]

The campaign also includes a series of posters which will appear as billboards:

Of the ads use of non-model, regular woman, the ad’s director, Kim Gehrig said: [blockquote]“I wanted to make the first advert that ever celebrated cellulite. You never get campaigns like this. They don’t exist. Women are usually spoken to through beauty or fashion, it’s very rare that they are spoken to as human beings.”[/blockquote]