Adidas is one of the topmost sports brands around the globe, having a wide and different product portfolio that spans from apparel as well as footwear for international players to premium fashion apparel as well as authentic steetwear. The company, headquartered in Germany, mainly focuses on five global priorities: Training, Football, Basketball, Running and the Originals label. Adidas Football is a brand that celebrates just as teams, so too individual players alike.
Business Objectives
The World Cup in SouthAfrica in 2010 began, Adidas make its entry into the tournament with two main goals: To become the most talked about sports brand in this World Cup and to promote the action, by means of internet, to football fans around the world. The brand was also aiming to bring about more awareness about the launch of its new F50 AdiZero football shoes in the world cup matches. Moreover, the company was also seeking to leave a legacy in South Africa after the games would end. Consequently, Adidas was trying to encourage Adidas fans for contributing to the Nelsons Mandela’s 46664 charity, which is HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention campaign.
the moment was very important for Adidas to manifest football fans around the world what it was like to experience the World Cup on African soil, as this was the first tournament in Africa. “We needed the best platform to enable fans to consume and engage with all this incredible content that was being captured and created on the ground,” says Gaetano Squillante, Head of Social and Digital Media, Sport Performance Division, Adidas. “We felt that Facebook was the platform best suited to helping us reach our objectives.”
In that period of 31 days of the World Cup, the company centered its full focus around Adidas Football’s Facebook Page – A free public profile that enables every company in this world to share their business portfolios and products launches and promotion with users on an ongoing basis. Adidas also made A Facebook Page to be a place where fans of Adidas Football could donate directly to the 46664 charity.
Approach
Adidas started its World Cup advertisements in May 2009 by launching its new F50 AdiZero football shoes and by rolling out its “Every Team Needs” campaign. From the inception to the end, Adidas Football World Cup campaigns centered on highly attractive and interactive content and games.“50 Days of Fast,” a web based application was developed around a graphic novel campaign and was designed to manifest the product benefits through highly creative content. The brand also designed various “reach blocks” that are ad buys on the Facebook Pages making the guarantee that the brand would reach its whole target audience in a 24-hour period. One reach block that focused on the F50 AdiZero football shows featured Premium Page Ads and Premium Video Comment Ads to engage users to connect with the Adidas Football Page and to view a video to see the shoes “in action.”
The company was building on its “Every Team Needs” campaign on Fb and was introducing applications such as “Player Type ID,” which was used to encourage users to select the different types of international football players they or their friends mostly know. When World Cup matches started in June, Adidas Football put its reach blocks in all of its key markets to kick off “The Quest.” The video premiered on Facebook, showcased the different player types that would be participating in the world cup. In several markets, the Premium Video Comment Ads was driving the video that featured top players of the world cup.
Another Facebook app built by Adidas Football was called “Matchups.” The app made people to put two players head-to-head, to let fans to predict match results, to share the result predictions with friends, and to engage with other types of content. The several interactions with the app helped users to earn points. At the end of the tournament, top scorers received Adidas prizes. “This again was supported through media using more targeted buys via Facebook cluster targeting to maximize efficiency,” Gaetano says. Adidas leveraged Facebook anonymized and aggregated data to target its ads to its key demographic of males who were 18- to 24-years old and who also listed “football” besides other keywords in the Likes & Interests section of their Facebook profiles.
Results
• More than 1 million people around the world connected to the Adidas Football Facebook Page over the course of the whole campaign. By mid October 2010, nearly 2.3 million people had liked Fb page.
• The average number of daily new connections increased to 16,975(over a 31-day period), after the reach blocks, versus 4,002 before.
• In just 31 days, the number of interactions on the Fb page reached more than 863,000.
• Viewer count for the videos of F50 AdiZero went over 1 million.
• A survey findings by a research firm showed that ad recall increased by 4 percentage points in the U.K. and by 6 percentage points in France after a June 11,2010 reach block.
Learnings
The company plans to keep investing in Fb as a platform and to keep growing its fan base among active users who like Adidas and want to get involved in the conversation. The company says that it is specifically interested in the ways around social commerce and how this can develop across Facebook and more particularly within the sports community.
Image credits: freshmag.com, selecticism.com
