DOMO | Under Armour Holiday

task

Create Under Armour’s first foray into holiday marketing, collaborating with the brand to craft an ownable, brand-right message.

We developed a message that equally paired inspiration with a call to action that would stand out among the congested holiday ad season. From the jump, we were faced with a few key challenges. How could we leverage Under Armour’s deep understanding of athletes in order to inspire purchasers, who may not be athletes themselves?

While triggering a purchase, how could we also continue to motivate the athletes themselves? Further, how could we cement the community’s view of Under Armour products as a premiere gift during the holidays for athletes at every level?

process

Solving this holiday challenge was an exciting opportunity — a blank state to further evolve the brand work DOMO has built with UA over multiple years. We began with strategic exploration of UA’s initial idea: that for athletes, the ultimate gift is one that they earn every day through training. Creative Director Ginger Boyd notes, “Strategically, while we knew this idea would resonate with UA’s existing athlete community, we needed to understand the gift-givers in the lives of those athletes. We dove deep into Under Armour’s role as a potential connector between the athlete and the gift-giver, a source of clarity that could shine a light on the way athletes live their lives for the non-athletes who care about them.”

With a clear objective in hand, the creative team got to work crafting the grammar system and various scripts that would carry the campaign. Following up on our 2022 campaign “The Gift of The Game,” writer Peter Buck zeroed in on the double entendre of the word “gift.” Through call and response style repetition, “Every rep, a gift. Every set, a gift. Every sweat, a gift…” we articulated how the gift of Under Armour product functions to unlock a greater gift for athletes. The refrain echoed through various platforms, crafting a resounding chorus that spanned sport, gender and age, from digital to IRL.

Writer/Director Noah Conopask brought the gravitas, harnessing the power of the holiday season to lend that bit of magic to our message. The minute details of sweat on a receiver’s brow, the steam rising from a power forward’s shoulders, and the gentle floating of snowflakes in through a gym door built up this world of Under Armour Holiday to its most salient state. For Conopask, “the campaign needed to go beyond just being about how athletes work hard. To bring the story to the next level I knew it had to transcend the physicality of sport. I worked intimately with our cast of real athletes to ensure that they infused the script with the truth, heart, soul and intensity of what the gift of hard work in sport means to athletes as a whole - and then crafted performances to connect them directly to the people who love them.”

With new original music, an anthemic TV spot, a multitude of targeted social ads, applications in print, retail, and beyond, the sheer scope of Give The Gift allowed for a nuance and depth to our message, tailored through a bespoke grammar system that flexed across various applications.