My best ad ever

"Real Girls Rock" is one year old

About a year ago, I released an ad from XX-XY Athletics in advance of the Super Bowl. It is called “Real Girls Rock” and it shows incredible female athletes kicking butt, working hard, enduring pain and injury and early mornings and brutal training regimens all to pursue becoming the best in their sport.

The female athletes featured in the ad are also brave enough to stand up for the protection of women’s sports. Because they know what’s at stake when men deciding they are women enter their sports and steal their opportunities.

And so on top of the punishing hard work, they endure the harassment from those who would have them erase themselves.

It was a labor of love. A short film, more than an ad, with a run time of almost 2 minutes.

We spent less than $40k to make it, and we spent zero media dollars behind it, and we released it in advance of the Big Game when everyone is paying attention to advertising.

And it took off. Viral views hit 40 million.

The day we launched it, it did ok. I can’t remember the exact number of views it got but I believe it was near 1 million. Not bad for a day’s work. But I was disappointed. I wanted more!

I went to bed thinking: Up and at ‘em again tomorrow. Let’s get this thing going!

It was the most we’d ever spent to make an ad. It was ambitious on our start up terms. We were less than a year old at the time.

We told a story. We had a plot. We had real athletes, locations, a real cinematographer vs what we’d done up until that point which was super scrappy and often shot on an iPhone. We’re a start up! We depend on ideas not big budgets!

I put myself to bed dreaming of ideas of how to drive some virality. Nothing — and I mean nothing — happens by accident. Could I get Elon to share it? Rogan? Rowling? How could I do my level best to get them to see it? I don’t know any of these people. They’ve never shared any of my tweets in the past. I have a following but not that kind of following! It’s modest in terms of Twitter “fame.”

Well, I woke up the next day to about a thousand texts. My phone was blowing up, as the kids say. Why? Because JK had done it. I tried to get it in front of the UK TERFs that I know. People she pays attention to. And it worked. Or it must have, I don’t know how she saw it. But she tweeted this:

She’s the queen of TERF-ery. She is the loudest and most famous voice defending women’s rights, standing against our erasure, and doing it all with her trademark sense of humor, wit and style. She is a writer after all!

Her sharing the ad alone got nearly 7M views. And from there the world shared it. Or what felt like the world to me.

Now, you can spend $7-10M on a Super Bowl ad. That’s the cost of the media alone. And I can tell you from my big budget days at Levi’s, I never spent less than $1.5M on an ad and that was years ago. 30 second ads easily can cost up to $4M in production and that doesn’t even include the cost of a big name star or a big name music track.

But this one — “Real Girls Rock” — it spoke to the truth. And people loved it.

A year later, I still love it. Why wouldn’t I? It’s great!

I’ve made more than a few Super Bowl ads in my day but there is no ad I’m more proud of than this. We relied on sheer ingenuity, creativity, passion for the subject matter and truth to make something that resonated deeply with people.

As you watch the game today, and pay attention to the ads (which people still do during the Super Bowl), and you look at all the razzle dazzle and money wasted, just think of our little ad. The little ad that could.

When it was going viral people wanted to raise money for us to secure a spot in the Super Bowl. Last year ads ran about $7 million for a 30 second placement. This year they are reportedly $10 million.

I told everyone — we don’t need it. We can’t raise that much anyway.

Just buy a t-shirt. Support the brand. And one day, we’ll get our spot in the Big Game.

Or maybe we won’t.

We’ll just keep making these. Because the truth reaches out and grabs you. And it’s worth far more than a multi-million dollar glitzy ad that says nothing at all.