adidas this week kicked off its largest marketing campaign in history, predicated on the assumption that "people are actually crossing cultural lines more than ever," according to the GLOBE & MAIL's Simon Houpt, who examines the campaign under the header, "Adidas Strives To Capture Global Culture Of Teen Spirit." For the last few years, adidas has been “building connections with three different communities: athletes, skate kids, and fans of fashion and music." Now, it wants to “bring those groups all together." adidas Canada VP/Marketing Jeff Cooper said, “We were basically telling stories on an individual basis, reaching out to those targets. But we weren’t pulling it all together and becoming meaningful and saying who we are and what we are, and that we’re relevant to them not just in sport but in fashion and in lifestyle.” Sid Lee Montreal VP Lukas Derksen, whose agency led the campaign's creative, said, “Something that definitely came out of the research is the mashability of kids these days. If you look at kids these days, they mash everything up. They wear stuff that we intended for the court, on the pitch. Stuff that we intended to be style, they wear in the gym.” He added, “I think the Nike brand has always been about the one hero, very individual.” Houpt notes the effort “isn’t just the largest ever by adidas; it is also, by far, the largest in the history of Sid Lee." The agency started planning for the campaign about 18 months ago, and Derksen said, “We spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out what the storyline is. When we landed on this sort of ‘unbridled emotions,’ ‘game faces’ -- this is a universal language. This speaks to a Chinese kid, this speaks to a French kid, this speaks to an American kid. And we all have this passion in common, and people relate to that passion.” Still, adidas will “slightly change its creative executions, dropping in celebrities who are important within different territories.” Derksen: “We have a Chinese version which is 90 per cent the same as everywhere else in the world, but we included a couple of artists and athletes that are relevant in that market" (
GLOBE & MAIL, 3/18).
