On: Run the City Guides

Our Run the City series was conceptualized to capture travel, sport, culture and lifestyle. During the past 12 months, exploring vibrant, faraway cities remained a distant memory for most of us. But by tapping into our local networks, we brought travel, leisure and sport to our global community through virtual run guides. The concept was easy for the audience to understand and provided an adaptable template for us to replicate for cities the world over. It works like this: The urban jungle isn’t the easiest place to run. But get it right, and it might just be the most rewarding. We’re here to show you the way, literally, with insights and stories from the runners and crews who have mastered their metropolis. From the best routes to navigating the local coffee hotspots, our city guides showed our communities how to run the city.

Goals

The goals for the campaign were:

• To create hyper-relevant local content for our communities in cities identified as strategically relevant for On.

• Simultaneously, create content that is relevant and engaging for a global audience, at a time when travel is restricted.

• Combine pillars of the On content strategy (running, travel, cultural) into one video series for compound storytelling and greater impact.

• Showcase our performance shoe for urban running, the Cloudswift, in its natural environment – crushing swift runs in the city.

• Secure 1 million views of the video series.

Challenges

Ordinarily, creatives from the On Content team would be on set to direct the shoot and capture content. This helps ensure not quality, but consistency with our brand guidelines across a series of 10 videos. During the pandemic, restrictions made this impossible. This meant a new approach, working remotely with our teams around the world, many of whom are not in creative roles, to run the shoots. It also meant careful recruitment of talent, creative, and production support from afar.

The Content team set templates and toolkits to help ensure consistency as different teams were tasking with creating results in similar styles. We communicated learnings from shoot to shoot so that, in true athlete spirit, the results got even better every time. Also important was not to over-brief, entrusting the teams on the ground to create authentic local content while keeping a consistent aesthetic and tone.

Results

Despite restrictions, the team produced a series of 10 videos featuring local guides in 10 cities across 5 continents. Subtitles, and the accompanying written guides were translated into 7 languages.

Every guide kept the creative consistent while delivering distinctly local content that was valued by our colleagues and communities in those respective locations, and by a global audience. In fact, the initial plan was to create only 7 guides, but demand from On teams in other market saw the number increase to 10. The article series on on-running.com, which served as an on-site video hub for the content received 60,000 article views.

To date, the video series has seen over 1.5 million views — 50% over target.