Megan Thee Stallion is Gymshark’s first celebrity ambassador, and her opening campaign with the fitness brand puts her in the middle of a group workout. “Megan Does Gym” uses her own recording of “Savage” as its soundtrack. The partnership also gives the rapper a place on Gymshark’s site to show which pieces she would pick from its existing collection of workout clothes.
Megan Thee Stallion has company in the gym in her first campaign for Gymshark. There is a group of women working out alongside her, and the exercise supplies the movement for a video that could otherwise have been a series of shots of clothes. As she trains, the viewer hears “Savage,” a record made for a different purpose that turns out to work as a soundtrack for the room.
The campaign is called “Megan Does Gym.” Gymshark has named her its first celebrity ambassador, a role that puts someone known primarily for making records into a programme built around people who train. The distinction matters because the campaign repeatedly shows her doing the activity the clothes are designed for. It gives people a reason to associate the new partnership with a habit they may already recognise in her.
In discussing the deal, Megan Thee Stallion said training had become an important part of her life. She spoke about the different ways people approach exercise, leaving room for people whose routines and reasons for going to a gym are different from hers. In the campaign footage, the group gives that point a visible form. There is a star in the room, and there are other women getting a workout in alongside her.
Gymshark chief commercial officer Carly Natalizia described exercise as a way the artist builds strength, clears her head and keeps pushing herself. This is how the brand explains the choice of ambassador. The commercial relationship comes with a familiar problem: someone can be well known to the audience without having much to say about the thing they have been hired to represent. Here the public side of the partnership starts from the rapper’s own interest in training.
The use of “Savage” puts another part of her working life into the footage. A listener can identify Megan Thee Stallion through the record before a shot gives any detail about what she is wearing. The sound gives the workout a rhythm to move against, much as it gives the viewer a way to recognise her in a setting far removed from a performance on a stage. The campaign keeps her own voice in the frame even while her attention is on the exercise.
That choice also explains something about how the clip is put together. A campaign for training clothes needs to show what the outfit is doing in motion. The performers can lift or move and let the clothes register along the way. The song carries some of the work that would otherwise fall to a narrator or copy on the screen. It tells listeners whose version of a workout the brand is inviting them to watch.
The shopping part of the deal is more straightforward. Megan Thee Stallion picked 50 favourites from the Gymshark collection for a selection on the company’s site. It is a set of choices within an existing range. Someone who watches the film and wants a closer look at the clothes can go directly to the items she selected. The number also gives her space to show a wider set of preferences than the outfits people see in the clip.
An ambassador can appear more than once in a company’s marketing. A selection of clothes gives Gymshark and the rapper something usable beyond the initial video. It lets the collaboration take a form that still makes sense once the announcement has passed. In this case the same person who is working out in the film has also made choices about pieces people might wear when they go to train themselves.
The campaign arrived in a period in which Megan Thee Stallion was putting out new music. In the weeks before the announcement she had released successive “Tina Tuesday Freestyles” and was preparing for “Act III.” The freestyles belong to her recording schedule, and Gymshark’s announcement gave no indication that the coming album was part of the deal. Putting one of her familiar songs under the advertisement gives the company use of something visitors are likely to know already. The music brings its own history, even in a clip whose immediate purpose is to draw attention to the woman in the gym.
The most direct statement about the partnership is still the first scene it uses to introduce her. Megan Thee Stallion has shown up in clothes she can train in, with people who have come to do the same thing. Her record starts and, for the length of the film, it belongs to the workout.
