adidas Basketball and Marvel announced today that they have joined forces to create a limited-edition ‘Heroes Among Us’ collection led by five new footwear designs.
Source: adidas and Marvel Celebrate Basketball’s Mightiest Heroes with New Footwear Collection
I was going to write a title that was less of a “check this out” and more of a “I don’t know about this”, so I settled on “check this out” because I’ve been handing adidas a lot of flack lately for missing the mark. What’s worse is that I’m in a rush and I’m going to leave a lot of real estate on the table for you to consider for yourself. This isn’t quite a “Missed Opportunity in Marketing” post. It’s an introduction to a concept and me asking, “what do you think?” With Endgame releasing the same day as the footwear, the collection of shoes featured are meant to capture the energy of the Avengers team:
- Marvel’s Iron Man | Harden Vol 3
- Marvel’s Black Panther | Dame 5
- Marvel’s Captain America | N3XT L3V3L
- Marvel’s Nick Fury | TMAC 1
- Marvel’s Captain Marvel | Pro Vision
In the first post in this new series of M.O.M. I used the artwork of M. Brian Bowens.
M.O.M | Under Armour Misses a Prime Local Marketing Opportunity
I raise this point because the artwork used in this campaign is good, but the pictures aren’t exactly flattering:
That picture of TMac looks more like Isaiah Thomas (Detroit Pistons IT) than it does TMac. Which isn’t the point. I really think that M.Brian Bowens would have created a better set of art and what’s worse is the file name of the pictures includes the word ‘Parody’. This is not a good choice of file names and although people can’t really see the filename, the internal decision to use ‘parody’ is bad.
What exactly is the missed opportunity here?
- Marvel is no longer a kid’s franchise. The series has gone dark and it is more for adults than it is kid’s. Creating a cartoon related campaign misses the mark completely because in doing so you lose the chance to actually brand the athletes, especially when the artwork doesn’t look like the athletes. Real pictures should have been staged.
- I like the use of TMac, but the recent hybrid release of the TMac Millenium didn’t sell. I like TMac, but why not go older and wiser with a less expensive sneaker using Kareem? A suede Top Ten/Superstar would have been a better shoe at a better price point.
- I know there aren’t many Black Avengers, but there are some Black Marvel characters. I get that they aren’t as popular, but for the sake of diversity couldn’t we have made the characters being represented the black/alien characters? (Yeah I know Alien could be a problem…) Think about this though, the brand should have used Harden as the Black Panther. He’s an MVP and Black Panther was one of the biggest movies in the franchise.
- Lillard is a good choice and I would have been just fine with him being Falcon or War Machine. Both played by Black guys.
- While I’m on it, Candace Parker is a great choice, but Shuri would have been a dope option because it would have allowed for a more technical analysis of footwear and talent (Although two Black Panther characters would be a tough sell.
- Why use John Wall? He’s been injured and the Wizards aren’t in the Playoffs.
- Why use John Wall in a shoe that I keep repeating over and over again is not being promoted correctly whatsoever. I wrote an entire post on this:
In other words this entire collaboration, like the Game of Thrones collab using last years UltraBOOST instead of the new 2019 UltraBOOST simply feels like a miss to me on a lot of different levels.
Am I wrong? Am I overthinking this? What do you think about the collab? I didn’t even show you the shoes which is a completely different problem altogether isn’t it?
Oh, take a moment to visit YouTube and you’ll find adidas Marvel videos and Jordan Brand x SpiderMan videos. When you compare the previous versions of adidas Marvel shoes, the Jordan Brand collab with Spiderverse feels more authentic. adidas should have made this a live action concept along with the cards which should be shipped in every box of course.
Interestingly enough Marvel has also collabed with Anta on the Klay Thompson 4