How Nike's Da Da Ding Gave Indian Women Athletes a New Beat
Indian advertising had shown women plenty of ways. Beautiful, dutiful, sacrificing, aspirational, gently ambitious in a manner the family could accept. In July 2016, Nike released a film that showed them sweating, and it did not explain itself.
The Beat That Changed the Frame
The film runs close to three minutes, which is long, and it moves like a music video, which is deliberate.
Women box, run, surf, swim, skate, and play cricket, hockey, squash and football. The editing is fast. The soundtrack does not let up. There is no voiceover explaining why women deserve to play sport, no inspirational narration, no moment where someone overcomes doubt and earns the audience's permission.
The film simply shows them competing.
That absence is the whole argument. Almost every piece of Indian advertising about women in sport before this had been structured as persuasion, aimed at a viewer assumed to need convincing. Da Da Ding skipped the persuasion. It treated women playing hard as an ordinary fact that happened to look spectacular on camera.
You do not watch the film and feel encouraged. You watch it and feel the tempo.
What Came Before It
To measure what the film did, you have to remember what the category sounded like.
Sportswear advertising in India had been built almost entirely around men, and around cricket in particular. When women appeared in sport-adjacent advertising, they usually appeared as spectators, supporters, or beneficiaries of a man's achievement. When women's fitness was addressed directly, it was routed through appearance rather than performance. The goal was to look a certain way, not to win something.
There was also a persistent framing problem. Advertising about Indian women's ambition tended to arrive wrapped in reassurance, carefully signalling that nothing about the family order was being threatened. Ambition was permitted as long as it was polite.
Da Da Ding was not polite.
The women in it are not asking. They are not softened for comfort. Several of them look openly aggressive, which in the context of Indian advertising in 2016 was close to a provocation.
The Craft Behind It
The film was Wieden+Kennedy Delhi's first Just Do It campaign for Nike, which is a significant thing to be handed. Just Do It is the most scrutinised platform in sportswear, and a first outing on it tends to be conservative.
This was not conservative.
It was directed by François Rousselet and produced through Division in Paris, and the international craft team shows in the result. The film has the grammar of a music promo rather than a commercial. Bodies are shot in fragments. Movement is cut on rhythm rather than on narrative. Colour is pushed. Nothing is explained because music videos do not explain.
The track carries it. Da Da Ding was made by Gener8ion featuring the American rapper Gizzle, and the campaign was named after the song rather than the song being scored to the campaign. That ordering matters. The film was built around a piece of music with its own momentum, which is why it does not sag in the middle the way long-form brand films usually do.
It is worth being precise about the credit, since it is frequently mangled. Gener8ion is the producer. Gizzle is the featured vocalist. The track is not simply a Gizzle song.
The Women in the Frame
The cast mixes a film star with working athletes.
Deepika Padukone anchors the film, and the choice was less arbitrary than it looked, since she played competitive badminton before acting. Around her are athletes across a genuinely wide spread of sport: Rani Rampal in field hockey, Joshna Chinappa in squash, Jyoti Ann Burrett in football, Ishita Malaviya in surfing, Shweta Hakke in sprinting, and the cricketers Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana and Shubhalakshmi Sharma.
Read that list from 2026 and something jumps out. Harmanpreet Kaur and Smriti Mandhana were not yet household names in 2016. They became two of the most recognisable athletes in the country. Rani Rampal went on to captain India. The film was early on several of these careers, which is either good scouting or good luck, and either way it has aged unusually well.
The surfing inclusion deserves a note of its own. Ishita Malaviya is widely described as India's first female surfer, and putting surfing in a national sportswear film in 2016 signalled that the definition of Indian sport being used here was deliberately wider than the one the market assumed.
The Criticism It Earned
The film was not received as an unqualified triumph, and the main objection was a serious one.
Nike never published a cast list. The athletes in the film went largely unnamed by the brand, and reporting at the time noted that Nike's own website did not identify the women in the ad apart from Padukone. Writing in Scroll, Jaideep Vaidya made that the centre of the critique, and it was picked up more widely: a film celebrating Indian sportswomen had declined to tell the country who they were.
That is not a small complaint. It cuts at the exact thing the film claimed to be doing.
The whole case for Da Da Ding was that these women were athletes rather than decoration. Leaving them anonymous while naming the movie star undercuts it. It means the athletes were, functionally, texture. Recognisable enough to lend authenticity, not important enough to credit.
There was a related objection about glamour. The film is shot beautifully, and some critics argued the styling and the grade pulled it back toward the aesthetic conventions it was supposedly breaking. Sweat, in this film, is lit.
Both criticisms are fair, and neither cancels what the film achieved. It is possible for a piece of work to move a category forward and still be compromised in how it treats the people in it. Da Da Ding did both, and the honest version of its history includes the second part.
What It Actually Shifted
The clearest measure of the film's effect is how quickly its grammar became the default.
Within a few years, the fast-cut, music-led, high-energy treatment of Indian sportswomen had spread well beyond Nike. Sportswear brands, and then non-sport brands, adopted the same visual language: fragmented bodies in motion, hard rhythm, no justification offered. A treatment that felt startling in 2016 became a recognisable genre.
That is what influence looks like in advertising. Not awards, but imitation.
It also arrived at a useful moment. Indian women's sport was gaining real public visibility in that period, and the film gave that shift a look. When the women's cricket team began drawing serious audiences, the visual vocabulary for putting those athletes on screen with force already existed.
The film did not create the change. It supplied the imagery for it.
Why a Music Video and Not a Story
The most consequential decision in Da Da Ding was structural, and it is easy to miss because the film moves too fast to analyse while watching.
The film has no narrative. There is no protagonist, no obstacle, no turning point, and no resolution. It is assembled as a music promo, cut on the rhythm of the track rather than on the logic of a story.
That choice was strategic, not stylistic.
Every narrative structure available for a film about Indian women in sport would have carried an argument the film did not want to make. A story about overcoming obstacles concedes that the obstacles are the interesting part. A story about earning family approval puts the family in the position of judge. A story about proving doubters wrong grants the doubters a role in the frame.
Narrative requires conflict, and any conflict the film chose would have implied that a woman playing sport is a contested proposition.
A music video needs none of that. It only needs bodies moving in time. By refusing story, the film refused the argument, and by refusing the argument it asserted something stronger than any argument could have: that this needs no defending.
The craft team was built for exactly that. It was directed by François Rousselet and produced through Division in Paris, and the film runs roughly two minutes and fifty-two seconds. That length is only possible because the track carries it. A narrative film of that duration on Indian television in 2016 would have been an extravagance. A music video is allowed to be as long as the song.
Bodies are shot in fragments throughout: a shoulder, a calf, hands wrapping for boxing, a foot planting. Fragmenting a body is normally the visual grammar of objectification, and here it is doing the opposite, because the fragments are all functional. These are the parts of a body that do the work.
What the Numbers Actually Say
The view figures attached to this film need handling carefully, because almost every version of them in circulation is either undated or inflated.
Wieden+Kennedy states that the film drew around three million views in its first 24 hours. Coverage in early August 2016 reported roughly 3.6 million views.
Both of those are snapshots from 2016, not lifetime totals, and Nike has never published a lifetime figure. Larger numbers circulate, including a claim of seven million within a week, and they trace to sources that cannot be read or verified. The frequently repeated assertion that this was India's most-viewed advertisement is supported by nothing at all.
Three million views in a day was genuinely large for an Indian brand film in 2016, and it is enough to make the point without embellishment. It is worth being precise about, because a film whose central criticism was that it did not name its athletes should not be defended with numbers nobody can check.
There is one more thing the record does not contain. No copy of Da Da Ding appears on any YouTube channel Nike operates. The version that survives and circulates sits on Wieden+Kennedy India's own channel, which is to say the agency's archive rather than the brand's.
For a film this celebrated, that is a strange absence, and it sits oddly alongside the decision not to name the women in it.
Why It Built India
Da Da Ding belongs in Campaigns That Built India because it changed the register in which the country was allowed to look at its sportswomen.
Before it, women's sport in Indian advertising was mostly a cause. Something to be supported, encouraged, made room for. Films about it carried an implicit apology and an implicit request.
This film made it a spectacle instead, in the way men's sport had always been permitted to be. Loud, physical, stylish, worth watching for its own sake and not for the message attached.
That reframing did something advocacy cannot. Advocacy asks an audience to approve of something. Spectacle makes them want it.
A generation of girls watched a film in which women who looked like them took up the entire screen and did not explain why they were there. No permission was sought on their behalf. No family was reassured. No compromise was signalled.
The athletes deserved to be named, and Nike should have named them.
But for two minutes and fifty-two seconds, Indian women's sport got to be the loudest thing in the room.
And once a country has seen that, it becomes very hard to go back to whispering.