Every year, the Tour de France deploys a specialist team called the Eraser Men. Two staffers who drive the full race route ahead of the peloton, armed with rollers and large quantities of paint, covering the graffiti that appears on roads and barriers before the race broadcasts it to a global audience. The most frequent target is penis drawings. Hundreds of them, stage after stage, scrawled onto the tarmac by fans who treat the temporary gallery of the world’s most famous road as an invitation. The Eraser Men paint over them. More appear. The cycle continues annually with no resolution in sight.
For the second consecutive year, Škoda and AMV BBDO have found a better use for the problem.
The Audience Gap the Campaign Addresses
The men’s Tour de France reaches a global television audience of more than 3.5 billion people across three weeks of coverage. The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, which follows immediately after the men’s race on largely the same roads, reaches approximately 23 million viewers. The women’s race is not inferior in athleticism, drama, or competition. It is inferior in visibility, by a factor that makes the gap between the two events one of the starkest in professional sport.
Škoda has been an official partner of the Tour de France for over two decades, and a partner of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift since the women’s race was relaunched in 2022. It is also a brand with a specific and relevant origin story: Škoda was founded as a bicycle manufacturer more than 130 years ago before transitioning to motorcycles and then automobiles. The cycling category is not a sponsorship of convenience. It is a return to the brand’s founding identity.
The Stencils
For the 2026 edition, Škoda equipped the Eraser Men with specially designed stencils created by two female artists rather than paint rollers. French illustrator Celine Dormeau and London-based illustrator Erin Aniker developed a design system that incorporated the original graffiti markings and transformed them into artworks that promote the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. The stencils are applied directly over the existing drawings. Where a penis graffiti sat on the tarmac, a bold illustration celebrating the women’s race now appears in its place.
Each finished artwork features the hashtag #WatchTheFemmes, the official hashtag of the women’s race, embedded in the design. The audience for the men’s Tour, three and a half billion people watching from their screens, becomes the unwitting audience for a promotion of the women’s race, delivered through a medium that costs nothing because it was already being created by strangers and had to be addressed either way.
The Precise Irony of the Format
The campaign’s creative logic is built on an inversion that requires no explanation to land. The Tour de France’s graffiti problem is, at its most literal, a consequence of how much cultural attention the men’s race attracts. Fans travel to remote mountain stages, camp overnight on the route, and spend hours on the roadside for a few seconds of peloton passing. The energy is real. The graffiti is a byproduct of that energy being expressed with spray cans and markers by people who have run out of other things to do while they wait.
The women’s race, which follows on the same roads, has a fraction of that attention despite covering terrain of equal difficulty and producing racing of equal quality. Škoda took the most visible expression of the men’s race’s excess attention and turned it into advertising for the race that needs more of it.
Meredith Kelly, CMO of Škoda Auto, described the approach: “Škoda started as a bicycle brand and has a long history of supporting the cycling community. As a brand that is known for bringing creative solutions to real-life challenges, we chose this playful and bold approach to build awareness to women’s cycling and give it the visibility it deserves. The Eraser Men do their best to remove as many of these markings as possible, but there are always more to deal with. These stencils allow us to turn something negative into something positive, to help promote the women’s race and encourage more people to watch it.”
The Scale and the Distribution
The campaign runs on the race route throughout the Tour de France, broadcast to the event’s global television audience whenever a camera captures the road surface. It extends across Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook from July 24. The artwork executions were distributed to media and cycling press at the campaign launch, giving the story its own earned media cycle alongside whatever organic coverage the route transformations generate each day.
This is the second consecutive year Škoda has run a version of this concept. The 2025 iteration, developed with FCB London, established the creative platform. The 2026 version deepened it with commissioned illustrators and a more intricate stencil design system. The campaign has become, in its own modest way, a new annual tradition of the Tour de France: the moment where the race’s most persistent antisocial footnote gets turned into something worth following.
CREDITS
Skoda:
Meredith Kelly Head of Global Marketing Skoda
Roman Rajtár Head of Brand Strategy and Content Production Skoda
Zuzana Varysova Global Marketing Campaign Lead Skoda
Anna Reznichenko Brand Strategy and Communication Manager Skoda
Jan Hejna Campaign Manager Skoda
Eliska Mrazkova Campaign Manager Skoda
Vašek Buchbauer Škoda Storyboard project manager Skoda
Martin Kupka Social Media Hub manager Skoda
Tereza Fojtíková Digital media manager Skoda
Veronika Ziegaus Head of Brand Experience Škoda Auto Skoda
Lukas Shon Coordinator Global Brand Marketing Skoda
Wiktor Roy – Lewanowicz Sponsering Manger Skoda
Agency:
Katy Wright Chief Client Officer AMV BBDO
Owen Lee Creative President AMV BBDO
Ben Jaffe Deputy Chief Strategy Officer AMV BBDO
Joe Pirrie Client Services Director AMV BBDO
Kelly St Lawrence Global Business Director AMV BBDO
Phoebe Newman Senior Account Director AMV BBDO
Mason Cooksley Account Director AMV BBDO
Kyle Harman-Turner Executive Creative Director AMV BBDO
Ben Edwards Executive Creative Director AMV BBDO
Nikki Chapman Production Partner AMV BBDO
Livvy Tidd Senior Producer & Creative Initiatives Lead AMV BBDO
Jack Walker Head of Art AMV BBDO
Tom Lindo Strategy Director AMV BBDO
Emily Maitland Senior Social Media Director AMV BBDO
Ben Fraser Creative Director & Global Innovation Director PHD
Krisztián Zvara Global Strategy Director PHD
Petra Šlachtová Global Digital Strategy Manager PHD
Rachel Morman Head of Social PHD
Jed Misa Social Director PHD
Production Company
India Timms Account Director/Producer Global Street Art
George Mapp Head of Digital Global Street Art
Dimitri Hebrard Head of France Global Street Art
Jo Hicks Artist Global Street Art
Mathilde Jacquemet Artist Global Street Art
Jack Margerison Photographer FL
Petra Stastna Content Creator Bazzoons
Cecile Dormeau Ilustrator and artist FL
Erin Aniker Ilustrator and artist FL
