As athletes continue to return to competition, we are celebrating sport this summer with our biggest multi-sport assortment of performance footwear to date. With the celebration of all sports, all tea
The Olympics offer a moment for every brand to capitalize on organic moments that resonate with consumers. In the Olympic trials the process begins as countries whittle away the layers of competitors pushing to be included on their countries teams. While the Olympics have always been a battle ground for sneaker companies, this isn’t the case anymore as media consumption has shifted. In 1984, the battle took center stage as Nike undercut Converse by dominating the marketing around the Olympics. Throughout the years, there have been incidents of brand loyalty that have become urban legend: Michael Jordan purposefully covering Reebok logos during the Dream Team run. Players being snubbed because they were sponsored by other companies. The stories are just as entertaining as the events.
The 2021 Olympics, postponed from 2020 due to Covid-19, aren’t without its own controversy heading into the event, athletes being dismissed due to failed drug tests, entire teams being removed due to the failure of track and field judges to properly configure the track, and swimmers not being allowed to wear swimcaps for natural hair. These issues all are disproportionately affecting Black athletes and this will present problems with viewership of the event at a time when sports have become media’s version of a small meal diet. Sports used to be the last bastion of advertising. The live events allowed for a captive audience. Today, that isn’t the case. With so many media options available, sports are now streamed in various locations and measurements of viewership are antiquated.
To account for this shift in viewership and advertising opportunities, adidas is utilizing their own platform to introduce their latest collection. The information for the footwear being dropped this summer is on their News Site. They are reinforcing the information using other digital aspects:
Pieces in the footwear assortment are available from today at adidas.com and via the adidas app.
The launch will be accompanied by “Seeing Possibilities”; a series of interview films, honoring the diversity in sport and aiming to inspire others to see the possibilities that comes with inclusivity within it. The films featuring Nneka Ogwumike, Uta Abe, Shoko Ota, Monica Okoye and Zhang Changing, highlight the athlete’s personal stories of seeing the possibilities of their ‘differences’.
Why is this important? Viewership happens in digital chunks. Youth culture gets their sporting information from 1 minute Tik-Tok videos. Twenty-Somethings capture info from Instagram and the rest of the world utilizes Twitter and Facebook. The social channels all rely heavily on YouTube as a source of information. In our own house, we watched the entire Olympic Trials on YouTube. As a cord cutting family, we don’t have cable, so we rely heavily on digital media. The brands who understand this are the brands who will capitalize on the upcoming Olympics. adidas has an early start. They began preparing for this with their Boost Boston Event:
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I discussed the importance of a digital strategy in the article linked above. While the Olympics are always going to be important. The fact that footwear companies have at their disposal social media outlets as marketing tools and a public that’s just as comfortable watching major movie releases at home as opposed to in theaters, adidas’ rollout of content around their Olympics collection should raise some eyebrows. They aren’t calling this collection “Olympics”. They are calling it their “Celebrating the Summer of Sporting” Collection. They haven’t tied their performance models to the event. They realize that the content they create for this moment will linger and carry on throughout the year and the chance to capitalize begins now.
That’s a smart thing.