Distance running store and BETC Paris launched Rob It To Get It on September 13, 2023 in Paris, letting shoppers keep apparel only if they outran elite French
ARCHIVEHow Distance and BETC Paris Put Sports Back Into Sportswear
Rob It To Get It is a one-day experiential activation created by running retailer Distance and BETC Paris, staged in Paris, France on September 13, 2023, in which shoppers could keep any coveted store item for free on one condition: outrunning elite French sprinter Méba-Mickaël Zeze, who was stationed at the door as the store's unconventional security guard for the day.
Distance operates as a concept running store in Paris, rooted in the intersection of sports, art, fashion, and design, as founder Guillaume Pontier has described it. The brand identified a specific cultural problem: sportswear had drifted far from its functional origins, becoming a fashion category defined by waiting lines, resale market inflation, and hype-driven scarcity that had little to do with athletic performance. The Rob It To Get It operation was a direct, theatrical response to that drift. Rather than offer limited items through conventional retail or lottery mechanics, Distance made physical speed the only currency that mattered.
On that single day in Paris, runners queued for the chance to select an item from a curated edit of the store's most sought-after sportswear and then attempt to flee past Zeze, a member of the French national track team who runs the 100-metre dash in under ten seconds. The result was unambiguous: 74 runners were caught, and only two succeeded in completing their heist. The activation was produced by Soldats and directed by Victor Sellier, with sound production handled by GUM, Paris. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100, reflecting strong creative distinctiveness and demonstrable cultural reach.
ARCHIVEDistance built the Rob It To Get It strategy around a single, uncomfortable truth about the French and global sportswear market. Sportswear had become a fashion craze almost entirely detached from its original purpose, as the brand's own brief acknowledged. Long waiting lines, customer disputes, and items immediately surfacing on resale platforms had become routine features of major sportswear drops across France and internationally. The operation was designed to make that contradiction visible and then dismantle it with one irreducible qualifier: speed.
The broader sportswear sector provides essential context. The global sportswear market is a growing market with significant momentum, and competitors Nike and Adidas dominate it at scale. Nike held approximately 15.2% of the global sportswear market in 2023, according to rawshot.ai, while Adidas held around 8.2% in the same period, per the same source. Distance, as a specialist running concept store rather than a mass-market retailer, was never competing on volume. It was competing on cultural credibility and community relevance, a positioning that Rob It To Get It expressed with precision.
The strategic insight driving the campaign was that the most persuasive argument for putting sports back into sportswear was not an advertising message but a physical gate. By making Méba-Mickaël Zeze the literal barrier between a customer and a product, BETC Paris translated an abstract brand value into a kinetic, memorable, and inherently shareable event staged in Paris. As reported by PRmoment on 10 November 2023, the activation was characterised as a provocative stunt designed to go viral, and Harriet Scott, CEO of GingerComms, named the Distance activation her standout PR stunt of 2023, as noted by PRmoment on 29 November 2023.
Victor Sellier directed the film documentation of Rob It To Get It for production company Soldats, Paris. The creative team at BETC Paris was led by Chief Creative Officer Stéphane Xiberras, with Art Director Jérémy Treccani and Copywriter Corentin Salignat shaping the campaign's visual and verbal identity. Sound production was handled by GUM, Paris. Brand management on the Distance side was led by Guillaume Pontier and Lionel Jagorel.
The creative execution operated on two distinct but interdependent levels. The live activation in Paris on September 13, 2023 was the primary event: a single day, a real store, a real elite sprinter, and real shoppers attempting a real physical challenge. The film that Sellier captured from that day was the amplification engine. Rather than a produced advertisement with controlled conditions, the footage preserved the authentic chaos, the failed attempts, the elation of the two successful runners, and the athletic authority of Zeze stopping challenger after challenger at the threshold. That authenticity was not incidental to the creative strategy; it was the strategy.
The campaign's experiential design was stripped of unnecessary complexity. Distance selected its most coveted sportswear items and made them available exclusively through this mechanic, removing any conventional retail pathway for the day. The simplicity of the rule — run faster than Zeze or go home empty-handed — made the premise immediately legible to anyone who encountered the film online, regardless of their language or cultural context. This legibility is a significant factor in the campaign's documented international spread across more than 70 countries, as reported by The One Club. The Rob It To Get It concept sits within a creative lineage for Distance that includes the earlier Outlaw Runners campaign from 2021, which similarly used speed as both subject and mechanic, placing elite athletes in public Paris spaces to trigger speed cameras, per betc.com.
No verified performance data for Rob It To Get It requires qualification here — the campaign's results are extensively documented and substantial. According to oneclub.org, the campaign generated more than 40 million organic views and more than 750 million impressions across more than 70 countries. Earned media value exceeded €12 million, per the same source. The campaign was the most mentioned and shared sports campaign for more than five weeks, also according to oneclub.org.
At Cannes Lions 2024, Rob It To Get It won a Bronze Lion in the Direct category and received shortlist recognition in the PR, Outdoor, Direct, and Entertainment for Sport categories, as reported by oneclub.org. At The One Show 2024, the campaign earned a Merit award in Influencer Marketing and Use of Celebrity, per oneclub.org, accumulating three total points under Annual ID OS24_SM100M.
The structural effectiveness of the campaign rests on the economy of its central mechanic. One athlete, one store, one day in Paris, and a binary outcome — caught or free — produced a story with universal comprehension and organic shareability across 70-plus countries. The activation cost Distance the equivalent of a modest production, yet generated earned media returns that a conventional sportswear advertising spend could not have replicated at comparable scale. The Rob It To Get It campaign demonstrates that when the creative idea is the media strategy, the distinction between a brand stunt and a brand film collapses into something considerably more powerful than either alone.
Rob It To Get It was a one-day experiential activation staged in Paris on September 13, 2023. Distance and BETC Paris invited shoppers to take any store item for free, provided they could outrun elite French sprinter Méba-Mickaël Zeze at the door. Seventy-four runners were caught; only two succeeded.
BETC Paris created Rob It To Get It for Distance running store. Victor Sellier directed the campaign film, produced by Soldats, Paris. The BETC Paris creative team included Chief Creative Officer Stéphane Xiberras, Art Director Jérémy Treccani, and Copywriter Corentin Salignat, with sound by GUM, Paris.
Rob It To Get It won a Bronze Lion in the Direct category at Cannes Lions 2024, per oneclub.org, and received additional shortlist recognition in PR, Outdoor, and Entertainment for Sport. The One Show 2024 awarded the campaign a Merit in Influencer Marketing and Use of Celebrity, also per oneclub.org.
Rob It To Get It generated more than 750 million impressions across more than 70 countries, according to oneclub.org. The campaign also produced more than 40 million organic views and earned media value exceeding €12 million, per the same source, making it the most shared sports campaign for over five weeks.
Méba-Mickaël Zeze is an elite French sprinter and member of the French national track team who runs the 100-metre dash in under ten seconds. Distance and BETC Paris chose Zeze as the activation's security guard because his athletic credentials made the challenge genuinely difficult and the campaign's core argument about sports credibility immediately legible.
Distance and BETC Paris identified that sportswear in France and globally had become a hype-driven fashion category disconnected from athletic performance. Rob It To Get It replaced conventional retail scarcity mechanics with physical speed as the only qualifying criterion, expressing Distance's brand values by making genuine athletic ability the price of entry.
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