Each summer season, because the Tour de France winds by means of mountain roads and countryside villages, it picks up greater than only a path of Lycra and dirt. The world’s most well-known biking occasion additionally has a curious custom of roadside penis graffiti, typically scrawled onto the tarmac by spectators and swiftly scrubbed out by organisers earlier than the press helicopters spot them.
Nonetheless, this yr, Škoda and FCB London noticed a special form of alternative in these undesirable scribbles. Quite than erase them, the automotive accomplice of the Tour has flipped the script, turning penis graffiti into an surprising out of doors media platform to advertise the ladies’s race, the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
The daring marketing campaign sees Škoda and FCB London deploy a crew of feminine illustrators to creatively rework the phallic art work on Stage 19 of the boys’s course, simply days earlier than the ladies’s race kicks off on July 26. These repurposed artworks are half satire, half celebration, turning an age-old nuisance into one thing altogether extra purposeful.
The designs, created by feminist French illustrator Celine Dormeau and London-based artist Erin Aniker, rework the graffiti into highly effective visible statements. Every bit options the marketing campaign hashtag #WatchTheFemmes, a rallying cry encouraging Tour followers world wide to tune into the ladies’s race, which runs till August 3.
The artists will journey the course in a specifically designed help automobile – Škoda’s unofficial 221st automobile within the race – as a part of a broader push to advertise gender parity in biking. It is a uncommon instance of out of doors media fairly actually assembly the street.
“Having began our journey in 1895 as a bicycle producer, biking is in our DNA,” mentioned Meredith Kelly, world head of selling at Škoda.
“With this daring visible assertion, we’re turning an undesirable drawback into a robust alternative to advertise ladies’s biking – and what higher platform to take action than by infiltrating the three.5 billion-strong viewership of the Tour de France.”
Owen Lee, chief inventive officer at FCB London, mentioned the crew noticed potential in the issue. “By turning the penises right into a dialog starter, we’re not solely serving to the organisers out, however celebrating biking and getting extra individuals to #WatchTheFemmes.”
The strategy combines media subversion with a transparent cultural message that refuses to let the ladies’s race stay within the shadows of the boys’s. Whereas the Tour de France Femmes remains to be comparatively younger, now in its fourth version, it is rapidly grown in visibility and status.
This yr, 22 groups and over 150 riders will sort out a 1,165km route from Vannes to Châtel, vying for the coveted yellow jersey.
For Škoda, this is not a one-off. The model is in its fourth consecutive yr as the primary accomplice of the Tour de France Femmes, supplying electrical and hybrid help automobiles for each races. This newest marketing campaign provides a playful, pointed twist to its help, bridging humour and objective with out dropping both.
Media planning and shopping for for the marketing campaign had been dealt with by PhD, with World Avenue Artwork coordinating the artist activations on the bottom.
It isn’t typically that penis graffiti turns into a automobile for equality, however within the fingers of FCB London and Škoda, what was as soon as a crude interruption has grow to be a catalyst for a much bigger dialog that is lengthy overdue in biking.
