Following the success of the World Athletics Championships, DOHA 2019, while a spotlight remained on Athletics, the IAAF chose to rebrand the federation to World Athletics. This came with one challenge, to attract and engage a new generation of young people to athletics, and at the same time bring the athletes into focus.

With bold colours, clean lines and a distinct feel, we worked to further build on the new World Athletics brand guidelines to ensure content was ownable, shareable and, most importantly, stood out creatively across social and digital. Effective, smart design, placing athletes at the heart of content and transforming the social feeds has helped create an exciting new look-and-feel.

A new brand also requires a new engagement strategy and we worked with World Athletics to identify how their target audience uses social, and the style of content that engaged them. Providing World Athletics with ongoing creative content from individual pieces, to campaign series and athlete features, we have managed to develop the new brand for social by tapping into relatable social trends, establishing a new, fun tone of voice and creating content that generates comments and shares by fans and athletes alike.

Working with World Athletics, we are able to contribute the full range of our services from content strategy and development, to creative conception and animation, to live event support and paid amplification, combining our expertise for the greatest results. By adapting the tone, style and look of content, we have created an engaged and passionate community of young World Athletics fans from across the globe, with some standout results to prove it.

As one of the leading sports for gender equality, International Women’s Day is always a high priority in our partnership with World Athletics. This year, we were tasked with creating a new identity to work alongside World Athletics’ brand to celebrate World Athletics Women’s Week. Taking inspiration from the Suffragette movement and the 1975 International Women’s Year posters, we created a new event pattern and colour scheme. We also created a new unique pattern device to represent a mental journey rather than a physical movement.