23red Forms Unique Agency ‘Collective’ to Win This Girl Can Creative Account

23red, part of Capgemini Invent, and one of the UK’s leading purpose-driven creative agencies, has formed a unique collaboration, The TGC Collective, to win the highly prestigious This Girl Can strategic and creative account. This follows a competitive pitch on the Lot One (end-to-end campaign solutions) of the Crown Commercial Services framework. 

This Girl Can, launched by Sport England in 2015, has transformed the way that women are portrayed in sports marketing by featuring real women of all shapes, sizes and abilities. By amplifying their voices and tackling the fear of judgement, the campaign has encouraged 2.9m women to get more active.  

With the 10th Anniversary of the campaign in 2025, the appointment of 23red signals the beginning of a new tranche of investment over the next four years into This Girl Can. The new work will address a fresh set of audience challenges and align with Sport England’s strategy “Uniting the Movement” which, at its heart, seeks to tackle inequalities that prevent women getting active. The focus of This Girl Can will be inactive women from under-represented groups – women for whom exercise may not even be on their radar. 

To meet this brief, 23red, already Sport England’s Partnerships and PR agency, created a bespoke agency model called the TGC Collective. This approach sees 23red partnering with Multicultural Marketing Consultancy (MMC), well known within Government for building long-term connections with multicultural communities to help reduce inequalities, and House of Oddities (HOO) – an independent creative and content agency founded to challenge the traditional agency model and champion fresh and diverse perspectives in the industry and beyond. 

The Collective has also secured insights and research from other partners including Chris Kenna’s BA Diversity Media Inc and Steven Lacey’s The Outsiders.

Sharon Jiggins, managing partner of 23red, commented on the win, “We cannot keep the generation of insight and creation of campaigns within the traditional confines of an agency environment. Our pitch winning strategy of ‘Belonging Starts With Inclusion’ applies to both how we work with Sport England as well as the work we will create for this next important phase of This Girl Can.  

So rather than ‘buying in’ representation, the best way to make truly representative work is for us to identify and join forces with brilliant creative minds and makers from the target audience demographics - or “our women”, which is how we prefer to refer to the audience with whom we need to engage. We have partnered with people who have the lived experience to be able to unearth genuine insight about what will motivate our women to get active.” 

Kate Dale, marketing director at Sport England, added, “Simply increasing the overall number of women who are active will not be enough. For this next phase we need to engage with the women who face the greatest barriers to exercise yet have the most to gain and deliver on our brand promise of no woman left behind.  

The TGC Collective impressed us with their creativity, passion, and strategic vision for This Girl Can. And 23red acknowledged that this challenging brief required a radically new way of thinking and behaving with an agency model that brings together a collective of specialists from diverse backgrounds. 

23red’s strategy of ‘Belonging Starts With Inclusion’ is a 360-degree approach that we believe will also help to tackle the barriers that our women can’t get over themselves. It will ensure that over the next four years, women feel listened to and supported by This Girl Can and the sport and physical activity sector. We look forward to a successful partnership.” 

The TGC Collective will work with Sport England to create a three-pronged approach to phase six of the This Girl Can campaign:  

• Raise it – raise awareness of and champion change on the issue of how our women are excluded from sport and physical activity.  
• Shape it – support and collaborate more closely with our sector partners to transform the way sport and physical activity experiences are delivered for our women.  
• Celebrate it – a consumer campaign that celebrates inclusion, shows what it looks like and truly reflects the lives of our women, helping them to feel like they belong.  

Sachini Imbuldeniya, co–founder and CEO of House of Oddities, added, “I feel like one of the women that has been left behind in the first iteration of ‘This Girl Can’, so winning this account is something that’s very close to my heart. I’m on a mission to ensure that our creative inspires women from all walks of life – with authentic representation, deep-rooted insights and honest storytelling at the forefront of everything that we do.

The TGC Collective is a bold new way of working, and I think it proves that creative agencies like House of Oddities and 23red can work collaboratively rather than in competition with each other, combining the best skills from each, in order to tackle big social challenges. It’s a testament to Sport England’s appetite for innovation that they chose to award the campaign to our collective.”

Patricia Macauley, founder of MMC commented, "Being part of the TGC Collective presents an exciting opportunity for MMC to play a pivotal role in addressing the needs of women from under-represented groups, with a genuine focus on reducing inequalities. 

I firmly believe that establishing trust and recognition within multicultural communities goes beyond simply telling our women what to do. By leveraging the influence of grassroots community groups and partners, we have the capacity to empower our women through powerful voices that will inspire them to get active. Working together, we cultivate a deeper sense of brand trust by shifting the burden of responsibility away from women to create a supportive environment where our women are heard and supported."