#WeDontPlay for International Federation for Equestrian Sports - Best Entertainment, Leisure & Travel Campaign Winner - Redtorch - The Independent Agency Awards 2022

Campaign Summary:

To ensure equestrianism became one of the “most engaged with” sports at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, our #WeDontPlay campaign aimed to dispel myths that the sport was elitist, boring, and hard-to-understand.

These misconceptions were discovered in a pre-Tokyo survey we carried out, suggesting this social and digital campaign for the International Federation for Equestrian Sports (FEI) would be no easy task.

As a small independent agency, we had worked with this client for four years, but this was our first Olympic campaign for them; we had been tasked with improving on its previous social media performance at Rio 2016.

So, when #WeDontPlay launched in August 2021, it was fuelled by the message that equestrians aren’t “playing”, instead they jump, fly and dance according to their discipline. This was the foundation of the launch film we created.

When the campaign ended in mid-September, we had delivered 3000 pieces of content and ensured equestrianism was one of the most engaged sports at Tokyo 2020, according to CrowdTangle, a third-party meta tool.

Content was delivered through owned, earned, and paid tactics across YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Giphy, FEI’s website, Reddit, Weibo, and WeChat, as well as via athlete and fan social accounts.

And with this we smashed our target of 2m engagements and 160,000 new social media followers, achieving 9.7m and 260,000 respectively, and even managed to win over Snoop Dogg as the sport’s most unlikely new fan!

- Redtorch​