A Successful Digital Marketing Story – Adidas

About Adidas

Adidas AG is a German multinational corporation that designs and manufactures sports shoes,  clothing and accessories. The company is based in Bavaria, Germany. It is the holding company for the Adidas Group, which consists of the Reebok sportswear company, TaylorMade-Adidas golf company (including Ashworth), 9.1% of FC Bayern Munich and Runtastic, a former-Austrian fitness company. Besides sports footwear, Adidas also produces other products such as bags, shirts, watches, eyewear and other sports and clothing-related goods. Adidas is the largest sportswear manufacturer in Europe and the second biggest in the world, after Nike.

Business Objective

Adidas was the sponsor of the  official soccer ball (known as the Adidas Brazuca)used in the 2014 world cup. The dual objective of their digital marketing campaign was to bring the excitement of the world cup to their consumer base, beyond just the physical walls of the stadium and to leverage this sponsorship of the official ball for increased consumer engagement, during the world cup.

Approach

They created the All in or Nothing Challenge, an online game launched in Brazil, that essentially gave users the chance to win the most coveted trophy of the World Cup: an official ball used in the tournament, along with other prizes like autographed boots and official jerseys from Adidas-sponsored players and teams.

The All in or Nothing challenge was integrated into a variety of online google channels, such as google Street view, Google Maps, Google Plus and Google Search. Adidas further pulled in big YouTube stars and Adidas-sponsored soccer players, with huge online fan followings to invite users to play, thereby widely increasing the audience and reach of the game.

Each day when the World Cup games ended, a new round of the challenge was released, Participation was very easy as all users had to do was log onto the game website which they could do via their smartphones, tablets or computers. Gameplay could even be started within interactive ads placed on the website. Once logged on they had to find Brazucas (Soccer balls), hidden in locations all over the world, through Google Maps and street views. In order to find clues to these the various hidden locations of the Brazucas, users had to answer trivia questions relating to the history of Adidas in world cups and careers of Adidas sponsored players. All in all users were immersed in a Adidas experience, wherein they had to complete the quiz and find the hidden balls.

There were a total of 31 rounds and each day 10 winners received prizes with the top winner taking home a official world cup soccer ball used in the 2014 world cup games. 

Results

• The challenge garnered 3,20,000 players who logged in total of 18,715 hours of gameplay
• 1.5 million unique interactions online
• A social media reach of 13.6 million people
• 1.2 Million views of YouTube videos posted online to promote the All in or Nothing challenge

Learnings

This was a very successful campaign as it leveraged a perfect mix of two very well established pillars of online marketing: Google and Online gaming. With google came all the successful properties associated with the search giant such as Google Maps,YouTube, Google Plus and with a well executed and playable online game came the positive word-of-mouth, which can be a deal maker or breaker in online marketing campaigns of this nature.

The digital marketing strategy adopted by Adidas, by launching the game in Brazil, was custom-made to suit its target audience which consisted of Brazilians, who are known to be football fanatics.

Adidas was successfully able to showcase its company branding effort, by tying up with a very popular sports property i.e the Football World Cup, especially in a football crazy nation such as Brazil.

This lead to an improved brand awareness and increased levels of customer loyalty and trust

This strategy also helped to scale up audience reach and influence in a relatively more cost-effective way as compared to the traditional TV ad slots, which during such big sporting events turn out to be prohibitively expensive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R94WLvCodoE#action=share

Image Credits: Adidas