Dick’s Sporting Goods

Campaign Strategy, Creative Direction, Campaign Production

The Contenders program is unrivaled in the support it offers Olympic hopefuls across the country, but remained largely unknown by both athlete and consumer alike. Dick’s wanted to leverage excitement for the program heading into the 2016 Olympics to shift brand perception in alignment with the social impact ethos at the core of the company.

Foundation

Dick’s Sporting Goods core belief is that sports matter—to individuals, to communities, and to societies at large. Of the many initiatives the organization has to activate this belief is the Contenders: a work program that ensures generous pay, flexible hours, and community support for over 300 Olympic hopefuls.

While Dick’s supports a number of socially-minded athlete initiatives, public perception of the company as anything more than a big box retailer lagged. Our project’s focus was to elevate the Contenders program to help consumers see Dick’s in the same tier as other leading social-impact brands.

Strategy

Our approach was to showcase the Contenders program not only as a pathway to the podium, but as a platform for Dick’s and the athlete-associates to express the profound impact sport can have on the lives of everyone who plays.

While many Olympic sponsors tend to focus on the emotional narratives of the athletes and attach their logo at the end, it was important for us and the objectives of the project to lead with Dick’s mission, the program, and how it uniquely supports the athletes’ ambitions. We heard how much of a game-changer the program was for the athletes—and how much joy they experience in sharing their love of sport with customers. Our job was to reveal these genuine stories rather than a fabricate an overly-produced marketing campaign.

DELIVERABLES

Campaign Strategy, Content + Roll-Out Strategy

Creative Direction

We wanted to approach the project through a journalistic lens in both film and photography, centering the stories of the athletes, capturing their unfiltered emotions, and representing the reality of the hard work it takes to realize their Olympic dreams.

We developed the campaign with three primary settings—personal life, work, and training—forming the bedrock of all the stories we would tell in the months leading up to the Olympics.

DELIVERABLES

Creative Direction, Video and Photography Production, Campaign Assets

The Contenders Omnibus Feature

All films directed by Jason Evans & Cole Nielsen; shot by Matthew Schroeder & Travis Pitcher; produced by Vincent Lin & Thea Hughes
under the direction of Chris Isenberg and Peter Christofferson at Doubleday & Cartwright.

The Contenders Program Vignettes

Photography

From Lake Placid to Pittsburgh, we spent a number of days with the Contenders, watching them work and work out. We documented them in their environments to anchor the work we were doing in social and brand comms.

Photographs by Nils Erikson, Brian Kelley, and Natalie Shields.

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“My Passion Is…”

Every Dick’s Sporting Goods’ employee wears their “passion” on their name tag. We asked the Contenders to tell us about the role passion plays in their lives and made short Instagram Story features from the conversation.

Contender Profiles: Dan McCoy

Profile features were executed in longer-form social videos and Instagram grid collages. We drew from our time together in Lake Placid to supplement and inform deeper dives on a select few Contenders who we time with in their homes, their favorite places, and their hometown Dick’s Sporting Goods where we got to witness them in action.