Campaign Trail is our evaluation of a few of the best latest creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns in the archives here.
The FIFA Women’s World Cup has been a godsend for sports fans during the dog days of summer this 12 months and comes at a tipping point for ladies’s football, a sport that has seen surging fan attention, ticket sales and broadcast audiences, with this 12 months’s Cup forecast to notch two billion viewers.
The sport has also increasingly drawn sponsorships from blue-chip brands including the likes of Budweiser, McDonald’s and Unilever, with some, like Frito-Lay, making their largest-ever investments in women’s sports. For Adidas, a partner of the Women’s World Cup since 1995, this 12 months’s event provided a chance to highlight the progress the sport has made — and what it still needs to reach full equality with men’s football.
Launched last month, just days before the tournament began, “Play Until They Can’t Look Away” revolves around a 30-second ad soundtracked by SL2’s rave-ready 1992 hit “On a Ragga Tip.” The spot features rising stars Alessia Russo, Lena Oberdorf and Mary Fowler playing football in unorthodox locations — a technicolor supermarket, an arcade-bowling alley and the woods, respectively — as they show off their skills alongside brand ambassador Jenna Ortega and football giants including David Beckham, Lionel Messi and Leon Goretzka.
As the motion cuts with the ball between settings and scenarios, items like a grocer’s nametag that reads “Oceaunz” (the official match ball of the tournament) and a checkout display that claims “It’s Coming Home” (the anthem of English soccer) function Easter Eggs for dedicated fans. Taking stars off the pitch and putting them in a brightly color, high-energy spot was central to Adidas’ strategy around attracting Gen Z and lighter fans of football to the women’s game, explained Global Communications Director Women & Adidas by Stella McCartney Sina Neubrandt.
“We wanted to break out of the football category conventions,” Neubrandt said. “It’s really about talking to an audience that perhaps is not yet fully bought into [women’s] football, but additionally you are making it exciting visually and putting them in a context that is sort of unexpected, that pulls the viewer in and catches their attention.”
Impossible to ignore
Before crafting “Play Until They Can’t Look Away,” Adidas gathered insights around the state of the women’s game and what role Adidas and a campaign should play. The brand found that despite the energy around the sport, with women’s football hitting the mainstream in lots of countries, it still has more work to do to reach full equality with men’s football in other countries and regions. In kind, Adidas decided to use its brand to drive energy and focus to the women’s game, using its portfolio of old football stars (and Ortega, a rising actor and booster of the sport) to elevate latest ones.
“We wanted to really use our platform to create household names and make those girls known for his or her talent, athleticism and skills in the context of this campaign,” Neubrandt said. “We want to show that the women’s game has come thus far and it’s really inconceivable to ignore nowadays… Either you’re keen on football or you do not.”
The idea of ladies’s football being “inconceivable to ignore” was a collaborative effort between various teams throughout Adidas — insight, football specialists, women’s brand communications — that was brought to life by creative agencies TBWANeboko and TBWA London, social agency TBWAX and film production company CANADA, amongst others.
“It’s all about collaboration. We are big believers that when different minds come together, the work and the world gets to a greater place,” Neubrandt said.
While making a campaign inside a big organization like Adidas might be “super complex,” Neubrandt called out the expert knowledge available throughout the process, from public relations partners that may also help the brand avoid pitfalls, to detailed-oriented football specialists, to a creative agency and internal brand marketing team.
“All these entities coming together and shaping it will possibly be painful sometimes, because there are a lot of opinions, but when you fish out what is significant to the creative, you really can elevate it,” she said. “Collaboration is essential to making exceptional work.”
“Play Until They Can’t Look Away” also required collaboration with loads of assistants and schedulers as Adidas worked to align availabilities of major stars to get the footage in the can and edited, with Neubrandt describing the effort as a “beast of a project.” But in the end, the campaign represents the next step in Adidas’ ongoing journey to elevate women’s football by breaking through a brand-heavy tournament with timely creative that has purpose and a perspective. The spot has greater than 120,000 views as of press time, and the brand has seen positive sentiment from each male and female consumers.
“At the end of the day, there’s only one football,” Neubrandt said, “and it doesn’t have a gender.”
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