“THE MIND SET” – THE AD COUNCIL

THE ASK

Mental health is critical to performance in sports — but it’s often invisible, misunderstood, and rarely talked about openly, especially for women athletes.

The Ad Council partnered with Amazon to expand their Love, Your Mind initiative, with a goal to make mental health more visible and more approachable for young women in sports. The challenge wasn’t just raising awareness — it was helping people understand what mental strength actually looks like, and where to find support when they need it.

The Insight

The mind is the real MVP.

In sports, we celebrate what we can see — speed, strength, endurance. But behind every performance is something invisible doing the real work. The mind trains before the body moves. It pushes athletes to keep going when things get hard. It helps them recover, refocus, and believe in themselves when the outcome isn’t guaranteed. Mental strength isn’t separate from performance — it makes performance possible.

The IDEA

Introducing The Mind Set — a collection of personal objects from elite athletes that represent the mental strength behind their success.

Instead of talking about mental health in abstract terms, we made it tangible. Each athlete selected an object tied to a defining moment in their journey — something physical that carried emotional weight. These objects became entry points into deeper stories — revealing the rituals, struggles, and mental tools that helped each athlete keep going.

• Skylar Diggins — Childhood Basketball: Chosen as a symbol of early ambition and the determination to pursue her path into the WNBA.

• Laurie Hernandez — Comeback Leotard: A reminder of resilience and the courage to return to gymnastics after facing personal setbacks.

• Chaunté Lowe — Survivor Bell: A symbol of strength and perseverance following her battle with breast cancer.

CAMPAIGN ROLL-OUT

Their inspiring stories will be showcased alongside mental health resources that can be accessed through various Amazon touch points with the goal of de-stigmatizing mental health care by presenting mental wellness as essential to peak performance in both sports and life.

• Films: A hero :60 film teases each athletes’ story and leads to the Custom Landing Page where each athlete tells their story in greater detail in three long-form films.

• Custom Landing Page: The Mind Set website features content about each athlete's story and allows users to explore mental health resources like breathing exercises, gratitude journaling, and meditation. Plus, to encourage athletes everywhere to take care of their minds, users who interact with three resources can enter a giveaway to win one of the objects.

• Interactive Fire TV Landing Page: A Fire TV experience lets users discover the objects in more detail as well as the specific mental health rituals that each athlete uses in their own lives.

• Amazon Music Playlists: Users can explore three bespoke Amazon Music playlists inspired by the athletes' qualities of determination, bravery, and resilience.

• The Mind Set Alexa Experience: Users can engage with mental health resources via their Echo device or by speaking to the Alexa app by saying, "Alexa, make my mind the MVP."

DESIGN Direction

The design system was built to make mental strength feel visible, teachable, and actionable. We partnered with female athletes to translate their personal routines into a structured experience where young women could explore the mental drills behind each athlete’s success. These drills were organized by key traits — determination, resilience, patience — creating a framework that made mental strength easier to understand and apply in everyday life.

Personal stories and meaningful objects anchored each section, giving users a tangible starting point before introducing guided exercises. The goal wasn’t just to inspire — it was to provide tools people could actually use. Every interaction was designed to support behavioral change. Clear pathways, repeatable exercises, and accessible resource formats encouraged users to return, practice, and build habits over time. This wasn’t just storytelling — it was designing for action.

ART DIRECTION

Our goal for the visuals was to make mental strength in sports visible, tangible, and relatable. But that was also the hard part: how do you point a camera at something you can’t see? You can’t shoot resilience or bravery the way you can speed or strength.

To show people what mental strength can look like, we leaned further into invisibility. We tried to capture honesty and abstraction to pull viewers inside the mind of an Olympic-level athlete. Intimate portraits layered with motion blurs, lens refractions, and light leaks. It wasn’t about making the athletes look flawless; it was about making the stuff we hide — rituals, processes, and internal dialogues — something everyone can see.