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Wimbledon Reclaims Its Ritual With It's A Wimbledon Thing
Wimbledon's "It's A Wimbledon Thing" campaign is a 2021 film-led brand initiative created by McCann London for the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, launched in the United Kingdom in June 2021 to mark the return of The Championships after the 2020 edition was cancelled due to COVID-19, inviting audiences to share their personal connections to the event through the hashtag #WimbledonThing.
The campaign arrived at a charged cultural moment. As reported by essentiallysports.com, the 2021 Championships ran from 28 June to 11 July, representing the first edition of the tournament in two years following the unprecedented cancellation of 2020. That two-year absence gave the return of Wimbledon a weight that few sporting events could replicate, and McCann London built the campaign's entire emotional architecture around it. Rather than leading with players, records, or competitive stakes, the creative proposition placed the audience at the centre, asking a deliberately open question: what does Wimbledon mean to you?
In the United Kingdom, where Wimbledon occupies a cultural position well beyond its status as a Grand Slam tennis tournament, this approach carried particular resonance. The campaign's single primary media asset, a film, was supported by a social participation mechanic anchored to the #WimbledonThing hashtag, encouraging fans to articulate their own rituals, habits, and memories connected to the event. Per clapboard.com, the campaign recorded more than 1.5 million views alongside over 4,300 likes and 245 comments, reflecting substantive public engagement across digital channels. The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100, reflecting solid creative and cultural alignment for a brand re-entry moment of this scale.
McCann London identified belonging, not competition, as the primary emotional currency of the 2021 Wimbledon campaign. The strategic insight was precise: after two years without The Championships in the United Kingdom, audiences were not simply fans awaiting a tournament — they were custodians of interrupted rituals looking for permission to resume them. By framing the campaign around the question "What's your #WimbledonThing?", the agency transformed passive viewership into active cultural participation.
This positioning represented a deliberate evolution from McCann London's previous work for the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. As documented by Creative Salon, the agency's 2018 campaign "History Is There to Be Beaten" had centred on players and the weight of Wimbledon's competitive legacy, using out-of-home media to address elite sporting ambition. The 2021 campaign, by contrast, broadened the audience frame from elite sport enthusiasts to anyone who had ever defined part of their summer by the presence of The Championships — a significantly wider and more commercially valuable demographic.
The market context reinforced the strategic logic. According to businesswire.com, the global tennis equipment market was estimated at approximately 3.77 billion US dollars in 2021. Within the United Kingdom specifically, Wimbledon functions as the sport's most powerful domestic amplifier, driving participation, retail, and media engagement each summer. Competitors including the US Open and Roland Garros also returned to full or near-full schedules in 2021, meaning Wimbledon needed to assert cultural distinctiveness rather than simply announce its return. The #WimbledonThing mechanic served exactly that function, positioning The Championships as an irreplaceable personal and communal experience that no other Grand Slam could claim to replicate in the British cultural landscape.
Academy Films produced the "It's A Wimbledon Thing" campaign film, directed by the creative duo known as Us, operating under Us Films. The production brought together a detailed creative and technical team assembled by McCann London to deliver a single primary media asset capable of carrying the full emotional and strategic weight of Wimbledon's return to the United Kingdom after two years.
Creative direction was led by Rob Webster and Alexei Berwitz, with art direction by Tom Dixon and Ran Stallard, and copywriting by Erik Uvhagen and Jenna Morrissey, as documented by clapboard.com. Cinematography was shared between directors of photography Rina Yang and Ben Magahy, a dual-DP arrangement that lends itself to the varied visual rhythms such a participatory, multi-perspective narrative demands. Production design was handled by Mikey Hollywood, with casting by HammondCox. The production was overseen by executive producer Medb Riordan and producer Steve Overs, with production managers Antonia Vickers and Laura Duffy coordinating the shoot on behalf of Academy Films, per clapboard.com.
The creative approach reflected the campaign's strategic brief with notable discipline. Rather than constructing a conventional sports advertisement built around athletic performance or aspirational achievement, the film privileged the texture of personal association — the small, idiosyncratic, often non-athletic habits that British audiences layer onto their experience of Wimbledon each year. Strawberries, television rituals, summer schedules reorganised around match times: the film gathered these fragments into a portrait of collective belonging. As noted by thedrum.com, the campaign was selected as one of the ten best advertisements of the week in The Drum's 16 June 2021 editorial, an indication that the creative execution registered with industry observers as well as general audiences. The film's paid media distribution extended the reach of a single asset across the United Kingdom, amplifying a production whose strength lay in specificity rather than spectacle.
Documented performance data for the "It's A Wimbledon Thing" campaign is publicly available and confirms meaningful audience engagement across digital platforms. Per clapboard.com, the campaign accumulated 1,511,927 views, 4,344 likes, and 245 comments, figures that represent a substantive response to a single-asset film campaign operating in the United Kingdom's competitive summer sports advertising environment.
Those metrics gain additional weight when read against the circumstances of the campaign's launch. The 2021 Wimbledon Championships were planned with reduced venue attendance — at least 25% capacity, as reported by Twinkl No — meaning the campaign carried a heavier-than-usual burden of sustaining public engagement for an event whose live experience was structurally constrained. Generating more than 1.5 million views under those conditions, for a brand-led film without a product transaction at its core, reflects an effective translation of cultural equity into digital reach.
The Drum's inclusion of the campaign in its "10 of the best ads of the week" selection on 16 June 2021, as reported by thedrum.com, provided independent editorial validation at the moment of launch, a form of third-party endorsement that extends the commercial value of the paid media investment. The #WimbledonThing hashtag mechanic created a participation layer beyond the film itself, though granular social amplification data from that mechanic is not publicly documented. Across structural, cultural, and measurable dimensions, the campaign performed as a competent and emotionally coherent re-entry vehicle for one of the United Kingdom's most recognisable sporting institutions returning after a two-year absence.
It's A Wimbledon Thing is a 2021 film campaign created by McCann London for the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Launched in the United Kingdom in June 2021, it marked Wimbledon's return after the 2020 Championships were cancelled due to COVID-19. The campaign invited audiences to share personal Wimbledon rituals using the hashtag #WimbledonThing.
McCann London created the campaign for Wimbledon's 2021 return. The film was directed by Us through Academy Films, with executive producer Medb Riordan and producer Steve Overs overseeing production. Creative direction came from Rob Webster and Alexei Berwitz, with cinematography by Rina Yang and Ben Magahy, as documented by clapboard.com.
Wimbledon chose fan-centred storytelling because the 2020 Championships had been cancelled, creating a two-year gap that made personal and communal rituals a more resonant reentry point than competitive sport. McCann London built the strategy around belonging, positioning Wimbledon as a shared cultural experience rather than simply a Grand Slam tennis tournament.
The campaign recorded 1,511,927 views, 4,344 likes, and 245 comments, according to clapboard.com. It was also selected by thedrum.com as one of the ten best advertisements of the week on 16 June 2021. The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100, reflecting solid creative and cultural effectiveness.
McCann London's 2018 Wimbledon campaign, titled History Is There to Be Beaten, used out-of-home media to celebrate the tournament's competitive legacy and challenge players. The 2021 It's A Wimbledon Thing campaign shifted focus entirely to fans and personal rituals, broadening the audience beyond elite sport enthusiasts, as documented by creative.salon.
The #WimbledonThing hashtag functioned as a social participation mechanic, inviting audiences across the United Kingdom to define and share their own personal connections to The Championships. It transformed the film campaign's one-way broadcast into a two-way cultural conversation, encouraging fans to become active co-authors of Wimbledon's brand narrative for the 2021 season.
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