adidas’ Digital Festival “Creators Club Week” Shows How Brands are Working to Recapture their Audience

In a year that has changed how we experience moments; we will be bringing our community together through a seven-day digital festival kicking-off on October 14th.

Source: CREATORS CLUB WEEK: ALL STAR LINEUP FOR OUR FIRST EVER DIGITAL FESTIVAL

ComplexCon is now the measuring stick for hype culture in a physical form. With COVID-19 disrupting our ability to congregate, Brands who hadn’t taken on the larger initiative of creating an interactive experience online are trying to mimic the concept created by Complex within their digital environments. It’s evidence that brands have to lead with digital especially when those brands lack the physical doors that many customers are returning to as the pandemic enters a fatigue phase.

Consumers haven’t been staying indoors anymore. They are visiting sneaker retail locations and contrary to what many people assume, sneaker stores have had incredibly strong sales at brick and mortar. They have also seen some increases in traffic online, but as unemployment and pandemic programs have ended that traffic is dying down and in North America, for adidas, this is a danger as the company doesn’t have many physical locations and all of their product is marked down in retail stores leaving new footwear on shelves with heavily discounted product.

Whew, that was a lot… but definitely not enough and I’m afraid it could be confusing. Let me get back to adidas’ Creators Club Week.

Complex will be hosting a digital version of their ComplexCon convention. adidas, realizing their lack of preparation in the digital space, has made a series of moves to adjust their engagement with the consumer. In the last few months the adidas app has seen a major overhaul and they have also dropped the CONFIRMED app:

CONFIRMED is more than just a destination for exclusive product drops. Fueled by a desire to provide fans of the Three Stripes with an unrivalled digital experience, the app will be home to engaging stories crafted with the brand’s top creators. From quick-fire listicles and interviews, to elevated storytelling and never-before-seen video, the platform will shed new light on the Three Stripes, bringing the untold stories of some of our most exciting releases to life. With community at its heart, CONFIRMED seeks to give users unprecedented access to Team adidas.

CONFIRMED is an obvious play at creating a SNKRS experience. The Creators Club Week is an obvious play at creating a Complex styled tool, but what is overlooked is that the brands are no longer simply facing other brands. The content creators who built up the hype machine around sneaker culture, Hypebeast, Complex, Highsnobiety and other sites are all monetizing and shifting their companies into various stages of e-commerce and media offerings. Those sites have created opportunities independent of sneakers and while they highlight shoes still, they don’t have to rely solely on kicks to garner engagement. The rich search history they’ve created gives them a consistent source of traffic; as search is the biggest funnel to website visits.

The brands realize they have screwed up and they are trying to offer experiences that amount to being content creators and media companies. I discussed this in detail in my book Nike’s Consumer Direct Offense, but it’s important to keep reiterating this position as I honestly don’t think it’s a large enough discussion in the industry as it relates to DTC growth. Especially when you consider that Nike’s biggest retail ally FootLocker has invested considerable money into digital engagement concepts like Greenhouse and NTWRK, and of course their big investment into GOAT.

In a year that has changed how we experience moments; we will be bringing our collective together through a seven-day digital festival kicking-off on October 14^th.

“Creators Club Week is the biggest ever celebration of our global member community and an opportunity to bring people together through our curated program of digital experiences. Holding our first ever members week and asking our partners that we’ve worked so closely with to headline this moment, is the most fitting way to introduce our latest innovations, freshest designs and sustainable products to the world.” Scott Zalaznik, adidas SVP of Digital.

An important thing to notice for adidas is their recent website traffic decrease on adidas.com. This year they had a peak in July of 24,000,000 visits per month. The site is now down to 19.3 million visits in September. Understand, September is typically slow because it’s post back-to-school, but things are a bit different now. By comparison, Hypebeast in June was at 9.5 million visits per month and in September they were at 10.3 million. Nike hovers between 92.3 and 105 million visits per month.

While my site isn’t as big as the previously mentioned sites, like my sales data reports, I can offer a micro-set of information via a look at important keywords in sneakers for my site:

Here are the important keyword phrases for my site in September. Note the article on Reggie Wilson is an outlier:

Note that there isn’t one reference to Yeezy or adidas in either list. adidas has placed their search and brand in the hand of sneaker and running sites for a long time. While Nike has created sites like air.jordan.com, Nike News, SNKRS, which can be viewed online and in their app, and a very active YouTube platform which is indexed and searchable, instead of relying solely on social media and influencers, which isn’t indexed and searchable, other brands lagged behind and the result is that retail outlets and sneaker media has diminished how much they are writing about non-Nike companies. Sneaker media has become like social media; brands have to pay to be seen and engagement isn’t that great anymore because sneaker media is busy creating content for a variety of outlets, not just sneaker people.

I’ve signed up for adidas’ Creator’s Week which has a list of interesting discussions, but I hate staring at my phone. I hope that adidas is smart enough to offer the event streaming on their desktop as well (that’s a hint).