PureGym Gives Its Category a Glow-Up

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Sometimes to craft a great campaign you need to go right back to the basic purpose of mass market advertising – growing a brand or category. That means making ads which talk to the people who aren’t yet in the category, as much or more than the ones who already are.

This is the thinking behind PureGym’s newest creative platform and campaign, “Feel PureGym Good”, created with McCann Manchester. On our Test Your Ad Competitive Edge database we list over 180 gym ads, but the average Star Rating (predicting long-term business impact) is only 1.9-Stars on a 5-Star Scale. Gym ads are having fitness issues, and the reason is simple. Most of them are talking the language of gyms, not the language of emotion.

As PureGym’s slogan suggests, they’re focusing on how exercise makes you feel, not on facilities or training programmes or membership plans. Going to the gym leaves you feeling fresh, positive and glowing with energy and health, and the way PureGym have decided to get this idea across is a tried and true one. They’ve created a brand character.

Brand characters are what we at System1 call a Fluent Device – a creative element which appears in multiple ads and drives the action of those ads. And PureGym have made a dazzling one. Glow is a big, shaggy humanoid creature made up of a coat of fibre-optic cables which change colour constantly, bringing to life the idea of that post-exercise glow. It’s a striking creation and the decision to make Glow a real, physical prop rather than a CGI effect makes the beast feel far more alive.

Having come up with Glow, what does the ad do with the creature? In this initial ad PureGym keeps things simple and we see Glow simply boogieing down the street to a classic Funkadelic tune from the 70s, feeling good about itself and greeting a disco ball as it walks by. It’s a charming, silly and entertaining ad that gets the point of the campaign across directly and well and makes viewers feel good.

How good? The ad scores a strong 4.1-Stars on Test Your Ad, while also getting Exceptional ratings for both short-term Spike and for Brand Fluency (fast, accurate brand recognition). All these are way over the Gyms category average. In fact, 4.1-Stars is the highest ever score in the Gym sector – PureGym and McCann Manchester have made the best gym ad we’ve seen.

The important thing to remember is that with these measures we’re looking at the feelings ordinary people have about the ad. And that means we know PureGym has a great opportunity with Glow to achieve their target of expanding the gym market rather than just persuading current users to switch. The ad brings home the emotional benefits of exercise without intimidating people who are scared about it not being for them. If a giant shaggy character like Glow can feel good, so can you! It’s another example of a brand breaking category conventions and reaping the benefits. PureGym got funky, got silly and got creative and they made the most effective Gym ad on Test Your Ad.