In 2022 TBWA\London orchestrated a kit launch like no other.

To help our client adidas launch the 2022 World Cup Federation Kits, we were tasked with generating maximum desire amongst the brand’s new key target audience: Gen Z. We tore up the old-fashioned ways of launching football kits and became culturally relevant to Gen Z to show adidas understands how they amass popular culture and share ideas between themselves.

An insight-led approach to creating relevance across cultures

No moment in sport and culture can unite quite like a World Cup. It is a chance to create a positive sense of national belonging. However, Gen Z’s relationship with football and their unique attitude towards national identity meant we could no longer rely on the fans to purchase official jerseys simply because they were fans of the World Cup. Priced out of the mainstream game, Gen Z feel excluded from every angle- from commentators they can’t relate to, to clubs charging the earth for tickets. We needed to position the kits beyond national pride and into a new form of self-expression. Gen Z first, national identity second.

A Disruptive, immersive launch strategy

We decided to launch the kits from grassroots up, not superstars down by hiding kits in the places Gen Z’s national identity lives and letting fans discover them for themselves. From Manga comics to a barbershop, we hid our kits in their neighbourhoods, their social platforms - all the places that are important to their identities. Each market created its own content to capture response to the kit “leaks”, and our master film then exposed adidas, off the record, as behind the reveals. Having created interest with our leak content, we then drove customers down the funnel with content linking to adidas.com, and through to physical retail environments.

Results

• This campaign alone has lifted engagement rates (3.9X to 165X) across all adidas channels, generating 6.13 million impressions with no paid media support.
• The campaign grew adidas’ search by 13%, making it 1.7X the search volume than Nike.
• On social, adidas garnered 7.6X more social mentions than Nike - despite having half the team qualify for the tournament.