When a brand like Nike takes the popular sentiment of empowering women and marries it with its proposition of promoting sports, ‘
Da Da Ding’ is born.
In its latest marketing initiative, the sportswear brand has gone all out to encourage sports among the fairer sex. The video, which features Nike’s brand ambassador Deepika Padukone and several female athletes, stands for girl power and marks a departure from past women-centric sports advertising in India.
Playing with a premise that never gets old, a Nike official statement says, “They may be spending their days in radically different ways, yet in their paths to respective successes, each learned the discipline and strengthened the confidence she attributes to her rise to early participation in sport, an anomaly in a country in which athletics has remained male dominated.”
Nike created a host of short videos with the likes of Padukone and Indian national field hockey player Rani Rampal where their accounts mirror sociological findings suggesting that female participation in sport helps to alter women’s image in numerous ways, including on aspects such as control, competency and strength. Padukone, who played national-level badminton before turning her full attention to acting, confirmed the theory, stating, “Everything I am today and everything I have achieved comes from my years of playing sports. My goals, my commitment, my focus, my dedication, my discipline, my hard work... I’ve learnt it all through sports. It has taught me how to fight. It has made me unstoppable.”
Rampal, who at the age of 15 became the youngest player on India’s national field hockey team, says sports helped build her self-assurance. “Coming from a small village never stopped me; every time I won a medal I kept getting stronger and more confident to take on the world.”
In the music video, Padukone and Rampal, alongside other leading Indian athletes — footballer Jyoti Ann Burrett and cricketers Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandana and Shubhlakshmi Sharma — urge India’s next generation to break conventions and define their own success by bringing sport into their lives.
Created in collaboration with Wieden+Kennedy India, directed by French director François Rousselet and set to an anthem by Genera8ion, featuring American rapper Gizzle, the ‘Da Da Ding’ad charts the rise of female sport across a diverse range of passions, including basketball, football, running, training and India’s national obsession: cricket.
