HOKA's 'Together We Fly Higher' Is a Running Ad That Isn't Really About Running

Most performance footwear advertising is about the individual. The lone runner before dawn. The athlete breaking through the wall. The shoe that makes you faster, tougher, better. HOKA’s 2025 global campaign, created by Anomaly, deliberately walks away from that playbook — and in doing so, produces something more memorable than any of it.

“Together We Fly Higher” launched globally in July 2025 and centers on a deceptively simple idea: no runner gets there alone.

The Insight

The campaign’s strategic premise is that running, despite being a solitary act, is always surrounded by community. Training partners. Coaches. Strangers cheering at mile markers. Friends who pack your nutrition. Families who rearrange their weekends around your race schedule. The shoe gets you through the door — the people get you across the finish line.

This is not a new observation about sport. What Anomaly and HOKA did is recognize that no major footwear brand was actually saying it. The category was full of heroic individualism. There was room for something more honest.

The insight also has a commercial logic. HOKA was already known for its maximally cushioned, unapologetically functional design — shoes that prioritized the feel of running over the look of running. “Together We Fly Higher” extends that ethos into marketing: it’s advertising that prioritizes the actual experience of runners over an aspirational fantasy of what running looks like.

The Film

The hero film is anchored by Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm” — a song about finding refuge in another person that was not written about running at all, and is more powerful for it. The music does something that a purpose-written athletics anthem could never do: it brings genuine emotional weight from outside the category.

Visually, the film captures unscripted-feeling moments that sit alongside the race footage. Breakfast before a long run. A grocery run with a training partner. Early-morning meetups. People waiting at the side of a trail. The production is warm rather than cinematic, observational rather than spectacular. It looks like running actually looks — unglamorous, repetitive, intimate — rather than how it is typically shown in advertising.

The film avoids the triumphant finish-line moment that closes virtually every other running ad. The climax, such as it is, is people together. The race is almost incidental.

Anomaly’s Approach

Anomaly, HOKA’s agency of record, built the campaign around what they described as the “emotional truth” that personal milestones are powered by collective effort. The creative choice to lead with community over performance required discipline — there are obvious pressures in footwear marketing to show the shoe at its most impressive, surrounded by elite athletes doing elite things.

Instead, the campaign features runners at various performance levels. The people in the film are not all young, not all fast, not all effortlessly athletic. This is harder to pull off than it sounds. Inclusive casting in advertising often feels tokenistic — a checkbox rather than a creative decision. Here it is the point of the ad, not a footnote to it.

Josh Fell of Anomaly articulated the brief simply: “Every great athlete is fueled by the support of those around them.” The film’s job was to make that visible.

Why the Category Needed This

Performance footwear is a category that talks loudly about humanity and then mostly shows superhuman. Nike’s “Just Do It” is about individual will. Adidas leans heavily on elite athlete association. New Balance has moved toward authenticity in recent years, but the imagery is still aspirational — better runners than most people watching.

HOKA occupies a different space in the market. Its core customers include ultra-marathon runners, healthcare workers on their feet all day, older athletes who have discovered the brand’s cushioning solves problems other shoes created. The brand is not aspirational in the conventional sense. Its customers are not dreaming of being someone else — they are deeply committed to doing what they already do, and doing it without injury.

“Together We Fly Higher” speaks directly to that customer. It is a campaign about endurance over spectacle, about the long haul rather than the peak moment. It reflects who the brand’s customers actually are, which is still rare in a category that usually reflects who the brand wishes its customers were.

The Production Choice That Matters

Setting the film to “Shelter from the Storm” rather than a commissioned track is the detail that separates this from a competent execution and makes it a genuinely good one. Bob Dylan did not write that song for HOKA. Bob Dylan did not write that song about running. The song’s emotional register — gratitude for the person who shelters you when conditions are difficult — happens to be exactly what the campaign is about.

Licensed music in advertising often works as punctuation, giving a scene a mood it could not generate on its own. Here the song is doing something more structural: it’s providing the campaign’s emotional argument in a form that audiences already have a relationship with.

Erika Gabrielli, HOKA’s VP of Global Marketing, framed the campaign this way: “Our individual progress is fueled by the collective. This campaign puts a spotlight on humans supporting humans.” The Dylan track makes that line true rather than just said.

What It Means

“Together We Fly Higher” is not the loudest campaign in footwear right now, and that is likely deliberate. It is making a quieter claim — that HOKA understands something about why people run that its competitors are not saying. Whether that translates to sales is a different question. What it does, without question, is give the brand a voice that is distinctly its own.

Client: HOKA (Deckers Brands) Agency: Anomaly Creative Lead: Josh Fell Music: “Shelter from the Storm” — Bob Dylan Year: 2025