Adidas, still young after 60 years

Hong Kong - As part of a global brand campaign to celebrate its 60th Anniversary, Adidas has launched a cross-platform campaign under the theme of Celebrate Originality.

The campaign strategy was to invite people to celebrate with the brand and to create celebrations everywhere.

As part of the local launch, the sports brand will kick off a major house party tomorrow and will invite "cultural influencers" from music, fashion and sports such as Japanese designer Kazuki, tennis player Stan Smith, DJ Steve Aoki and celebrities like Shu Qi and Jan Lamb.  

As the campaign aims to target young adults with pop culture and fashion sensibilities, adidas has for the first time partnered with alivenotdead.com to tap into its online community of artists and fans.  

Carlos Palacios, strategy director for Carat, said it was very important for the brand to remain culturally relevant.

"In order to do this we wanted to start a conversation with key influencers in the market, alivenotdead provided us with the perfect platform to do this," he said.  

Jasmine Tsang, account director for Carat, said in line with the communication strategy, adidas has undertaken a "complete outdoor domination" of Causeway Bay to create the feeling that "celebrations are literally everywhere" for the consumer. The outdoor campaign extends to trams and ice cream vans.

Apart from outdoor, the campaign is available on TV, print such as Respect and Milk magazines, cinema including a digital component.

To demonstrate that adidas originals unites and touches diverse pockets of popular culture around the world, musicians and trendsetters like Jan Lamb, Josie Ho, 24 Herbs, MC Jin and MR have designed a series of special invitation cards to get people to join in celebrating orginality and 60 years of soles and stripes.

To entice consumers to join the celebration online, adidas used the latest digital technology known as augmented reality to create invitation cards that when viewed via a webcam, an animated birthday cake will move out from the card in the computer screen.

Those who do not have a webcam or invitation card could log onto the website and interact with the celebration message uploader tool or download a mobile application that enables consumers to take pictures with thematic backgrounds and templates.

Andrew Lee, partner for Rice 5 said: "We wanted to leverage digital technology to help us create something that was truly unique and that integrated celebrations from the real world to online and then back into the consumer's world. Thus staying true to the strategy of celebrations everywhere."

An online campaign on key sites such as Yahoo!, MSN, Facebook, Xanga and My903.com will be used to drive traffic to the campaign site.

TBWA developed creatives and Carat is the media buying and planning agency with Rice 5 the creative digital agency for this campaign.