Norda
Creative Direction · Audience Insight · Film Direction
The joy was never in spite of the discomfort.
It was inside it.
.Female participation in trail running has more than doubled in three years. Half of female runners say the sport's marketing does not represent them. Facts like those rarely stay in the same room for long: the gap between them is a commercial opportunity with a start line, and this campaign was built to be first to it.
Purpose
There was no client brief. I gave myself one. At the time, I noticed the female athletes on Norda's page were far outnumbered by the male ones, and it struck me because the athletes who have pushed me hardest, personally, have almost always been women. I wanted to make something that celebrated that directly. The cast model in this film is a close friend, a runner and a genuinely active person who has inspired and pushed me more times than I can count. She trains in temperatures that most people would use as an excuse to stay inside. For her, showing up became the whole point.
Before a single frame was shot, I audited over 380 posts from Norda's Instagram feed and sorted every image into categories. Nearly four in ten showed no person at all. A quarter showed legs, silhouettes, fragments. Among the people you could actually identify, men outnumbered women nearly two to one.
That ratio isn't a flaw. It's a mirror of the sport Norda lives in. Women make up 26 percent of the field at UTMB and around 16 percent at the hundred mile distances. But the sport is transforming underneath those numbers. Female trail participation has more than doubled in three years, and roughly half of female runners say the marketing doesn't represent them. The fastest growing audience in trail running was the one with the least screen time.
So the film became the answer. No lifestyle framing, no cropping her into an anonymous pair of legs. A female athlete showing up in the worst conditions the trail can offer, filmed the way this sport has always filmed its men. As a competitor, first and last.
The Thinking
Film Approach
Most running films sell speed, achievement, the finish line. This one is about none of that. It is about the choice made before any of it, the decision to go out into minus 30 degree cold every single day. The film does not try to convince you the cold is comfortable. It just shows you what it looks like when someone stops needing it to be.
The film above is finished work. Everything below is the campaign it was built to lead, presented the way I would take it to market.
Strategy
Three answers a campaign has to earn before it spends: who is buying, what actually decides the purchase, and what the brand should mean by the time they do.
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Women entering trail and ultra running now: road runners trading pavement for elevation, Gen Z athletes discovering the sport through the feed, and the experienced women already racing who have never seen themselves in the imagery. They buy premium when the brand earns it, and they notice immediately who is shown as an athlete and who is shown as decoration.
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Women are not absent from the trail. They are absent from the frame. Every competitor brand is chasing the same growth segment with the same soft lifestyle language, which leaves the most credible position unclaimed: treating female athletes exactly the way the sport has always treated its men.
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Norda is the brand that films women the way ultra running films its heroes. In the worst conditions, by name, as competitors. Not a women's campaign. A correction of the lens.
The audit is the scorecard. The same 380 post methodology, repeated quarterly, tracking the share of identifiable female athletes against the campaign's commitment. Beneath it: female follower growth and engagement on norda's channels, women's sell through at stocked doors and online, and attendance at the phase three community events. The campaign begins and ends with the same instrument, which means nobody has to take the results on faith.
How I would measure it (proposed)
Campaign architecture (proposed)
Three phases, following how belonging actually forms: see it, believe it, join it.
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The hero film launches across norda's channels and the feeds where the audience already lives, supported by cutdowns built from the film's hardest moments. No campaign wrapper, no manifesto voiceover. The proof does the talking, and the contrast with the category's soft focus does the positioning.
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Norda publishes its own numbers. The feed audit becomes a public commitment: this is who we have shown, this is who we will show, updated in the open. Athlete features follow through the race calendar, women by name, at the distances where their share of the field is smallest. Transparency at this level is itself a story, and the sports press covers it as one.
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The audience becomes the imagery. Women's shakeout runs and trail crews at norda's race presences, shot in the campaign's language and fed back into the feed, so the ratio moves because the community moved, not because a quota did. By the end of phase three, the campaign photography and the community photography are indistinguishable.
From a feed audit to a film shot in the harshet conditions the trail could offer, the project became an answer to a question the data kept asking. Not another portrait of endurance, but proof of who else has been enduring all along.
Creative Direction · Audience Insight · Brand Strategy · Concept Development · Campaign Development · Film Direction · Film Production · Cinematography · Sports Marketing
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