Brand Activation Photography: Nike x Rebel Girls Tour
An open-top bus, two cities and a target wall
Through July and into August 2023, Nike and Rebel Girls ran a football tour across London and Paris timed to the Women's World Cup. It travelled on an open-top bus loaded with kit and set up wherever there was room — a pitch, a plaza outside a shopping centre, a park in Paris. I photographed it as a brand activation: the build, the crew, the public, and how the two met.
That means covering things a match photographer wouldn't bother with. The 'Score Practice Zone' with its target wall and running clock. A pledge board filling up with handwriting through the afternoon. A coach holding out a board of stickers. Display boards naming Leah Williamson and Fran Kirby, so the line between a Saturday queue and an England shirt was drawn in public. A wall of footballs in Paris that everyone stopped to be photographed against.
Activation photography has to do two jobs at once. It has to give the marketing team images that work as campaign assets — clean, on-brand, usable at any crop. And it has to be an honest record of what the activation actually did, because that's what the client shows the people who funded it. Those two briefs pull in opposite directions, and the way through is to shoot it as documentary and let the branded environment do its own work in the frame.
If you're planning an activation, a roadshow or a community programme and need it photographed for both marketing and the record, that's the job I do. More commercial work with brands and agencies, and the participants' side of this same tour is here: a day of girls' football with Girls United.