Social Ambassador Program and UGC
As a French brand, much of Decathlon Australia's content library was created in European locations. While visually polished, it often didn't reflect Australian landscapes, seasons, lifestyles or sporting culture - which made it difficult for local customers to see themselves in the brand, and for us to run campaigns with local relevance.
To solve this, I developed the Decathlon Ambassador Program, a scalable creator strategy designed to generate authentic Australian content, strengthen brand awareness, and build a reusable content library that supported everything from organic social, paid advertising, CRM and onsite eCommerce.
Social Media
Content Strategy
Branding
Creator Marketing
Social Media Content Strategy Branding Creator Marketing
The Context
We relied heavily on global creative assets that showcased European environments, sporting habits and customer behaviours. Although high quality, the content lacked local relevance and wasn't delivering the engagement or authenticity Australian audiences increasingly expected.
At the same time, social platforms were shifting towards creator-led and user-generated content, with authentic recommendations consistently outperforming highly produced brand creative.
The challenge wasn't simply finding influencers. It was creating a sustainable content ecosystem that balanced brand consistency with authentic storytelling, while remaining commercially viable within a lean marketing budget of mostly gifting contra products.
The Insight
People trust people far more than they trust brands - Nielsen found 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over all other forms of advertising.
Rather than investing heavily in traditional production shoots, we chose to empower real customers and creators to tell authentic stories using Decathlon products in environments that genuinely reflected Australian life.
Beyond creating engaging social content, the program provided a growing library of high-quality creative assets that could be repurposed across paid media, CRM, ecommerce, product launches and future campaigns.
As this was a high-touch project, I lobbied to recruit specifically for Social and Content Specialist to run it - the first time we had that position within Decathlon Australia. You can learn more about how I recruited, built and developed a high performing team here.
The Execution
We developed and launched the Decathlon Ambassador Program, beginning with a gifting-first model to validate the strategy before securing additional investment for a longer-term creator program.
Recruited 79 Australian creators across a diverse mix of sports, lifestyles and family audiences - for both one off and ongoing partnerships balancing budget and performance results.
Built creator briefs and guidelines to maintain consistent brand standards while encouraging authentic storytelling.
Prioritised creators who were already brand lovers and reflected local customer segments, including snow sports, camping, surfing, fitness, families and everyday recreational athletes and aligned key deliverables with our campaign calendar.
Negotiated content usage rights, allowing assets to be repurposed across paid advertising, CRM, ecommerce and organic social channels.
Created an ongoing pipeline of creator content rather than relying on one-off campaign shoots.
Tested creator content against traditional branded creative to optimise campaign performance.
Developed long-term ambassador relationships with high-performing creators as the program matured, inviting them to our event activations and store openings.
The result was a scalable content engine that continuously generated authentic Australian storytelling while significantly reducing reliance on expensive content production.
The Impact
The success of this project changed how we approach internal content creation, shifting from globally supplied assets to locally relevant storytelling that better reflected Australian customers and sporting culture.
The program created a valuable library of user-generated content that improved engagement, strengthened brand authenticity and supported both brand-building and commercial objectives across multiple marketing channels.
By proving the effectiveness of a gifting-first model, we secured further investment to evolve the initiative into an ongoing creator program that continues to deliver value beyond individual campaigns.
Rather than treating creators as a media buy, we positioned them as an extension of the brand, building genuine long-term relationships that strengthened trust, community and authentic storytelling.
79 creators recruited to the program, for both one off campaigns and ongoing partnerships.
500+ pieces of content produced across video, carousel and stories for both Instagram and TikTok.
Views from UGC non-followers of average +86% compared to internally created and brand content of +37%.
Uplift of +63% engagement rate, +81% comments and +102% reach on average.
CTR growth of up to +400% for Meta using UGC ads vs brand content.
Organic social growth of +320% for overall website traffic, boosting our top of funnel.
