For a long time, sports marketing was a CUT AND PASTE yawnfest. You signed a big-name athlete. You put them in a dramatic landscape. You used words like performance, power and endurance. Rinse, repeat, sell trainers. But something has dramatically shifted over the last few years. The fitness and sports world has quietly become one of the most creative, inclusive and culturally interesting spaces in marketing. It’s outpacing fashion. It’s outpacing beauty. It’s doing things that luxury brands would never dare to.

So what’s actually happening? And what can brands outside the sector learn from it?

The Death of the One Big Athlete

The era of pinning everything on one superstar ambassador - (Ronaldo, Messi, Venus) - isn’t gone, but it’s been radically complicated. Smart sports brands have worked out that a single famous face can’t carry all the weight anymore. Not culturally, not commercially, not in an age where audiences are fragmented across endless platforms and have a finely tuned radar for inauthenticity.

Salomon, for instance, has been deliberately cutting its athlete roster from roughly 300 down to 40, restructuring around what it calls “the legends, the solid up and coming and the young guns.” The logic: depth of relationship over breadth of coverage. Rather than the traditional “spray and pray” model, they’re building genuine integration between athlete, product and storytelling1. The seven-year contract with ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalte is the template. It’s a partnership, not a poster.

Also - WHAT about this short film? “Office Hours” by Salomon; the trainers positioned as the symbol of escape. J’ADORE.

JD Sports and Nike have been doing something entirely different: tapping Louis Theroux to front the return of the Air Max 95 OG Neon, pairing him with a culturally fluent cast specifically designed to push the launch beyond sneaker audiences and into mainstream conversation. The campaign included a gamified mechanic spanning Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and London, built around branded InPost parcel lockers… turning a shoe drop into a scavenger hunt. This was topical, cultural, playful and brilliant.

The lesson here isn’t “use a documentary maker instead of a footballer.” It’s about thinking deeper; thinking broader; thinking differently. Who or what actually embodies the feeling you’re trying to create? How can we build something interesting in that world?

Fashion and Fitness Have Fully Merged (And It’s Beautiful)

If you want to understand where sportswear is going creatively, watch what happens when performance meets fashion. This is where things get genuinely exciting.

At London Fashion Week this February, our beloved Simone Rocha debuted her first collaboration with Adidas Originals - pearl-encrusted track jackets with puff sleeves, frilly sports bloomers, ruffled three-stripe long-sleeves, and ballerina-style sneakers with crystals at the heel. The reengineered logo alone (the Adidas Trefoil nested inside Rocha’s signature “SR” ribbon motif) was a clear statement. It wasn’t sportswear doing a fashion collab. It was fashion and sport at complete parity, each transforming the other. As one commentator put it, Adidas is dominating the high-end fashion collaboration space today in much the same way it dominated the celebrity collaboration space in the 2010s2.

Meanwhile, Danish designer Cecilie Bahnsen has been doing something equally interesting with ASICS over multiple seasons. Their ongoing collaboration has launched “The Signature Series,” inviting creative voices to reinterpret ASICS classics through their own lens, underpinned by the brand’s theme of “Sound Mind, Sound Body.” The result? A performance shoe that wandered into a flower garden…and sold out. Again. This is the sixth chapter of their collaboration, first showcased at the Autumn Winter 2025 show in Paris, blending couture intricacy with technical performance, aiming for a design that contrasts softness with structural elements.

The cultural reach of these collaborations matters as much as the product. They’re making sports brands interesting to people who don’t consider themselves sports people…and that is a MUCH bigger market.

The Experience Is the Campaign

One of the most significant shifts in fitness marketing is the move from broadcast advertising to activation. The best campaigns aren’t things you see- they’re things you go to, feel, participate in and talk about afterwards.

In Berlin in October 2024, Les Mills and Adidas staged a “fitness rave”3; world-class workouts, VR technology, light shows and performances from Berlin’s top musical talent. GENIUS. After successful events in Berlin and Madrid, the tour continued to Athens and Cyprus…a world tour where working out is the headline act.

Nike has been operating in similar territory with its After Dark series. A global women’s race series spanning seven cities, each stop pairs race-day competition with pre-race prep, post-race celebrations and branded community experiences. When it launched in 2025, a third of attendees were first-time racers and around half were inspired specifically by the female-only format. The product is the race and the brand is the safety net. And that framing is everything.

Here in Ireland, we’ve seen this shift playing out at ground level in ways that are genuinely moving. Dublin’s run clubs have become a full-blown cultural phenomenon. The Mild Activity Run Club, for instance, has grown into a large supportive social community since 2020, hosting weekly runs in paced groups, social events and sports days - including their Wednesday evening 6km finishing at Bambino’s pizza (ABSOLUTELY INSPIRED) Run Talk Run is a run club dedicated to talking about mental health challenges, is now a regular Sunday ritual in Dublin and Limerick. And if you haven’t heard about Scottie is Fat and his Mince Rub Club (and yoga club: Wonkee Club), you need to get on it!!

The Brand Activation That Surprises You

The most interesting thing happening in fitness and sports marketing right now is the move into completely unexpected cultural territory.

This principle - taking your brand into a space that surprises people, that makes them feel something unexpected - is one that fitness brands are getting exceptionally good at. And nothing illustrates it more purely than one uniquely Irish example: CMAT collaborating with O’Neills on a range of GAA jerseys and shorts. The collision of the most exuberant pop star in the country with the most earnest sporting institution in the country. It shouldn’t work. It works completely. It works because it’s real - because CMAT actually wears GAA jerseys, because O’Neills has the cultural credibility and the wit to lean into something joyful and strange. That’s the whole game.

Women’s Sport Is Finally Getting What It Deserves

There is a genuine, structural shift happening in how women’s sport is being backed, branded and amplified - and it’s not just nice to see, it’s commercially transformative.

Period care brand Sequel became the first official tampon sponsor of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever in-stadium access for teams and fans alike. Founded by former Stanford athletes, the brand has used sports partnerships with fitness studios, pro athletes, the WNBA and the Paris Olympics to push its agenda forward4. This is a product that didn’t exist in stadium sponsorship before, from a brand that understood that the alignment was perfect. Beyond legacy names like Nike and Adidas, new deals are shaping up across the WNBA: Mielle, Glossier, SKIMS and others have secured league-wide sponsorships, while we’re seeing more brands bringing discussions around motherhood, hormones, menopause and more to the fore of their communications.

Closer to home, we’ve just witnessed a new brand Feirla designing GAA shorts specifically for girls and women with period-ready protection and compression where it’s needed.

The lesson isn’t just “sponsor women’s sport.” It’s: find the alignment that’s so obvious in retrospect that people wonder why it didn’t happen sooner. Then do it.

What Does All This Actually Mean?

If you’re a brand watching this and wondering what to take from it, here’s what I think the good stuff has in common.

1. It earns its place in culture rather than buying it. The CMAT x O’Neills collab works because it’s rooted in something real. The Salomon Office Hours campaign was brilliant because it reflected back the reality that both people were looking to outdoor adventure to escape the 9-5 AND that the trainer has been used to top and tail the corporate uniform as people walk/ cycle to work. Joanne McNally becoming the SHE-O of Lifestyle Sports in the run up to Christmas 2025 was sublime as McNally has been working with them (and her on-stage 3-stripe tracksuits) for some time now.

2. It creates a feeling, not just content. The Les Mills rave in Berlin wasn’t a campaign. It was an event that people told their friends about. Nike After Dark isn’t an ad. It’s a race that first-time runners signed up for because the format made them feel safe enough to try. Dublin Front Runners isn’t a sponsorship play. It’s a Saturday morning run with a deep sense of identity and belonging.

3. It’s genuinely inclusive, not performatively so. The best fitness marketing right now doesn’t gesture towards inclusion - it builds structures that make inclusion real. Women-only race formats that remove psychological barriers. Run clubs that welcome wheelchair users, beginners and anyone who just wants to come for the coffee after. Brands putting tampon dispensers in WNBA arenas because that’s the most basic thing they could do for female athletes.

It understands that the product and the community are the same thing. The shoe is the story. The race is the brand. The run club is the campaign.

The brands getting this right have stopped asking “how do we market to our community?” and started asking “how do we actually be part of one?” That’s a different question entirely. And it’s producing marketing that’s so good you almost forget it’s marketing at all.

Have you seen anything worth getting excited about? Drop it in the comments. Always love seeing an unexpected campaign or collab.

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