Jellyfish & HOKA Turn New York Running Into Citywide Competition

Jellyfish, the integrated global digital marketing company within The Brandtech Group, has launched a new campaign for HOKA that turns New Yorkers' everyday runs into a citywide expression of the running community, according to the companies' announcement. The month-long challenge, hosted on the running app Strava throughout September, invites residents to log miles for their home borough as all five compete against one another. As those miles accumulate, ticker-inspired creative will turn the competition into a public scoreboard on digital out-of-home screens in Times Square, Tribeca, SoHo and Williamsburg, cycling through weekly updates on miles logged, pace and other running statistics. The work aims to bring HOKA's 'Together We Fly Higher' brand platform to life by making runners and their activity part of the campaign itself, according to Jellyfish.

What is the HOKA Run Your City Challenge?

The activation is a month-long challenge hosted on Strava throughout September where New Yorkers log miles for their home borough as all five boroughs compete against one another, according to Jellyfish and HOKA's announcement. The challenge builds on HOKA's existing global partnership with Strava, the announcement states. Jellyfish developed the campaign concept and is leading both creative and media planning for the initiative. Throughout the month, participants can track their borough's standing as miles are aggregated and displayed across digital out-of-home screens in key Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods, creating what the agency describes as a public scoreboard that updates weekly with cumulative miles, pace data and other running statistics.

The competitive framework transforms individual exercise into a collective civic event. Rather than viewing running as a solitary activity, the campaign reframes each logged mile as a contribution to a borough's total, fostering rivalry and community simultaneously. This structure mirrors similar city-based fitness challenges that have gained traction in urban centers worldwide, though the integration of real-time digital out-of-home displays represents a distinctive execution layer. The campaign's reliance on Strava's existing infrastructure — including its segment tracking, leaderboards and social features — reduces friction for participants who already use the platform, while the borough-based team format lowers the barrier to entry for casual runners who might be intimidated by individual competition.

How does the digital out-of-home component work?

Ticker-inspired creative will serve as a public scoreboard on digital out-of-home screens in Times Square, Tribeca, SoHo and Williamsburg, cycling weekly updates on miles logged, pace and other running statistics, according to the announcement. The creative approach takes data that typically lives on a runner's phone and projects it onto the streets of New York, making personal activity visible at a civic scale. Jo Wallace, Global Executive Creative Director at Jellyfish, said in the announcement: "The creative idea is simple: make every run visible. We're taking something that usually lives on a runner's phone and putting it out on the streets of New York and in social feeds. Suddenly, your miles are not just yours. They're contributing to your borough, fueling a rivalry and becoming part of the city and community around you."

The selection of locations — Times Square, Tribeca, SoHo and Williamsburg — covers high-traffic corridors across Manhattan and Brooklyn, ensuring visibility among both participants and the broader public. The ticker format evokes financial market displays, an aesthetic choice that reinforces the competitive framing while leveraging the real-time data capabilities of digital out-of-home networks. Weekly updates mean the creative must be dynamically refreshed, suggesting a production workflow that can ingest Strava data, process borough totals and push updated assets to screens on a compressed timeline. This technical requirement distinguishes the campaign from static out-of-home buys and aligns with a broader industry trend toward data-driven, programmatically updated creative that responds to live inputs.

What role does paid social play in the campaign?

Paid social drives participation and extends the borough competition beyond the streets throughout September, according to the announcement. The media plan includes activation on TikTok and Meta platforms, targeting running and fitness enthusiasts across New York City. This digital layer serves dual purposes: recruiting new participants into the Strava challenge and amplifying the borough rivalry narrative to audiences who may not encounter the physical out-of-home displays. The platform selection reflects where running communities are most active socially — TikTok for short-form creator content and community challenges, Meta for broader reach and event promotion.

The paid social strategy effectively creates a funnel: out-of-home builds awareness and civic spectacle, social drives acquisition and engagement, and Strava hosts the core competitive mechanic. This multi-channel approach is consistent with contemporary campaign architecture where no single platform carries the full weight of the experience. The targeting parameters — running and fitness enthusiasts in New York City — suggest a focus on efficiency over breadth, concentrating spend on users with demonstrated category interest. For a month-long activation with a specific geographic scope, this precision reduces waste while maintaining sufficient scale to sustain participation momentum across four weeks.

Who are the creators involved and what is their role?

The campaign includes a creator program led by Collectively, the creator marketing company within The Brandtech Group, with six creators representing the five boroughs, according to the announcement. These creators will encourage runners to join and document their own participation throughout the month. Those assets will be part of the paid social activation on TikTok and Meta, targeting running and fitness enthusiasts across New York City. The borough representation model — six creators for five boroughs — implies at least one borough has multiple representatives, though the announcement does not specify the distribution.

Creator-led amplification has become standard in brand activations targeting younger demographics, particularly on TikTok where algorithmic distribution favors authentic, personality-driven content over polished brand messaging. By assigning creators to specific boroughs, the campaign localizes its appeal: a runner in Queens sees someone from their neighborhood participating, which may feel more relatable than a centralized brand account. The creators' documented participation also generates a library of user-generated-style assets that can be repurposed across paid and owned channels, extending the campaign's content yield. Collectively's involvement brings institutional creator management infrastructure — contracts, briefings, approvals, performance tracking — that individual brand teams often lack.

When and where does the challenge culminate?

The challenge culminates October 3 at McCarren Parkhouse in Brooklyn with a HOKA-branded daytime block party celebrating participants from across the city, according to the announcement. The event will bring runners, creators and the broader community together for food, drinks and programming. Creative assets sharing highlights of the event will be featured in an October social media campaign that expands reach beyond New York to target runners and fitness enthusiasts around the country. This national extension suggests the New York activation serves as both a standalone market event and a content generator for broader brand storytelling.

McCarren Parkhouse, located in Williamsburg's McCarren Park, has a track record of hosting fitness-adjacent community events, making it a logical venue for a running-branded gathering. The October 3 timing — one week after the September challenge concludes — provides a buffer for content production and creates a distinct milestone that separates the competitive phase from the celebratory phase. The block party format, with food, drinks and programming, signals an intent to attract beyond the core running community, potentially drawing local residents, press and social media attendees who amplify the event's reach. The follow-on national social campaign leverages the event's visual assets — finish-line celebrations, creator interactions, borough pride displays — to tell a story that resonates in markets where the physical activation did not occur.

What is the Highsnobiety publisher partnership?

A publisher partnership with Highsnobiety will extend the campaign with a planned recap following the event, according to the announcement. Highsnobiety, a digital media platform covering fashion, culture and lifestyle, brings an audience that overlaps with HOKA's target demographic of style-conscious runners and fitness enthusiasts. The recap format — likely a feature article, video package or social series — would document the challenge's narrative arc: borough standings, standout participants, creator journeys and the block party finale. This earned-media-style placement on a third-party platform adds credibility and reaches audiences who may not follow HOKA or running-specific channels.

Publisher partnerships of this type have become common in brand activations where the campaign itself generates a story worth telling. Rather than relying solely on owned channels to distribute post-event content, brands collaborate with editorial platforms that can frame the activation within broader cultural trends — in this case, the intersection of running, streetwear and urban community. Highsnobiety's positioning at that intersection makes it a logical partner. The announcement does not specify the format, timing or distribution details of the recap, leaving those elements to be defined as the campaign progresses.

What does this campaign reveal about experiential marketing trends?

The HOKA Run Your City Challenge illustrates several converging trends in experiential marketing: the fusion of digital tracking with physical-world spectacle, the use of civic geography as a competitive framework, and the layering of creator, paid, owned and earned media into a single coordinated activation. The campaign does not merely sponsor a race or place ads near running paths; it makes the act of running itself the content, the competition and the creative canvas. This approach — where consumer behavior generates the campaign's visual output in real time — represents a shift from broadcast-style brand messaging to participatory systems that reward engagement with visibility.

The involvement of multiple Brandtech Group entities — Jellyfish for creative and media, Collectively for creator management — reflects a holding-company model where specialized capabilities are coordinated under a single client relationship. This structure enables integrated execution across disciplines that might otherwise be fragmented across agencies. For HOKA, a brand that has grown rapidly in the performance footwear category, the campaign signals an investment in cultural relevance beyond product performance, positioning the brand as a facilitator of community rather than simply a supplier of equipment. The borough-versus-borough mechanic taps into New York's intense neighborhood identity, a insight that would not translate directly to other markets but demonstrates how localized cultural intelligence can drive campaign architecture.

Why it matters

For small businesses and microbusinesses, this campaign demonstrates how a localized competitive framework can transform a generic product category — running shoes — into a community event with earned media potential. The core mechanic — logging activity on a free platform (Strava) that feeds a public leaderboard displayed on rented screens — is conceptually replicable at smaller scale. A local run specialty shop, for example, could organize a neighborhood challenge using Strava clubs, display results on a storefront TV or projector, and partner with nearby cafes for a finale gathering. The costs shift from media buy to coordination and creative production.

The campaign also illustrates the value of platform-native content. By using Strava's existing social features — segments, kudos, comments — the brand avoids building custom technology. Small businesses can apply the same principle: identify where their customers already congregate digitally, then design activations that leverage those platforms' native mechanics rather than demanding users adopt new tools. The creator program, while executed through an agency at this scale, follows a logic accessible to smaller operators: find local micro-influencers who already embody the brand's values, equip them with a simple brief, and amplify their authentic participation. The block party finale — food, drinks, programming — is fundamentally a community event that any local business coalition could organize with shared costs and shared audiences.