Coppertone x Ilona Maher Reinventing an Icon | The Coppertone Girl, all grown up.
For more than 70 years, the Coppertone Girl has been one of the most recognizable icons in American advertising. In 2025, we gave her a modern counterpart. Olympic rugby medalist Ilona Maher became the new face of Coppertone, recreating the brand’s most famous pose on her own terms: strong, confident and unapologetically herself. One partnership became a 360 campaign across TV, social and a Miami takeover that turned the city into a billboard.
The challenge
Coppertone had heritage everyone knew but nobody was talking about. The brand needed to feel relevant to a new generation without throwing away the icon that made it famous.
The idea
Don’t replace the icon. Bring it to life. Ilona is an athlete, a dancer, a model and a creator with millions of followers who love her for owning her body and her voice. That’s a “4-in-1 performance,” just like the product: Coppertone Sport 4-in-1. We recast the Coppertone Girl as a woman who tackles on the field and owns the beach, with the iconic puppy right beside her.
Two worlds, one system
We built two connected expressions. The masterbrand side is yellow, playful and nostalgic (“Seize the sun,” “Welcome to Miami”). The Sport side is navy, bold and built on performance (“Unbeatable performance”). Same icon, same talent, two jobs.
Social: the human side of the icon
On social, we let Ilona be Ilona. The campaign imagery showed the icon, and social showed the person behind it: funny, real, talking straight to camera, the voice her followers already love. We built that personality into the new Coppertone Girl through a mix of paid and organic content, from behind-the-scenes moments to product demos to Ilona in her own words, and it drove every Coppertone social channel. The 3M organic impressions and the flood of comments showed that people weren’t just seeing the new icon. They felt like they knew her.
