Adidas is channelling its brand heritage of colliding different cultures, like rap music and sports, with its fall-winter “Unite” campaign for its Originals product line, targeted at adults aged 18 to 25.
With creative handled by Sid Lee’s Montreal office and media by Carat, the campaign is running in 55 countries and relies primarily on a digital video that features a cultural collision between Run DMC (who released a track about Adidas footwear titled “My Adidas” in 1986) and DJ A-Trak.
The video allows visitors to interact with it and create their own Adidas anthem using voice command technology, designed in collaboration with Google, or by typing in words that pop up on the screen to unlock special content and visual effects. Viewers can then share the video with friends via Facebook and Twitter.
To help promote the video, Adidas is relying on search advertising and YouTube pre-roll, as well as leveraging bloggers to drive to the video microsite. To coincide with the digital campaign, Adidas is also running OOH ads in major urban markets like Toronto and Vancouver to promote new looks in the Originals product line.
Simon Wassef, head of strategy, Sid Lee Amsterdam, says that this campaign marks the first time that Adidas has leveraged speech and command recognition to create an interactive video for consumers to collaborate with, adding that it’s part of the brand’s overall strategy to continue to push technological boundaries to reach its consumers.
“Our audience is natively digital. They move seamlessly online to offline, consuming and sharing content as currency and as an indicator of how culturally connected they are,” he says. “As such we didn’t want to create classic advertising that would drive to an online platform where they could ‘like’ the experience or go shopping. We wanted the advertising to be the experience, and vice versa, with opportunities to interact, share and shop all in the one place.”
The campaign will be in market until 2014.
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