How longtime FIFA partner Adidas is leaving its mark on the World Cup

Plenty of brands plan well in advance for major international sporting events like the World Cup—but Adidas may have them all beat in terms of timeline.

The German sports apparel and footwear powerhouse has been preparing for this summer’s tournament for almost a decade, around the time the US, Canada, and Mexico were awarded their joint bid to host in 2018, according to Chris Murphy, SVP of brand marketing for Adidas North America.

“You can’t understate how important both soccer and the World Cup are to [Adidas] in North America,” Murphy told Marketing Brew. “This has the opportunity to take what is already a growing sport in this market with soccer and advance it even further.”

With the tournament approaching its end, the prep seems to be paying off—Adidas made a splash before kickoff with a campaign film starring Timothée Chalamet and Bad Bunny, along with World Cup stars Lionel Messi, Jude Bellingham, and Lamine Yamal, and USWNT and NWSL forward Trinity Rodman, and then repeatedly (and sometimes literally) did so as the tournament progressed using a variety of tactics, ranging from out-of-home (OOH) activations to fan events.

Splashy

Adidas, which has been a FIFA partner of more than 50 years and a partner of Major League Soccer since its inaugural season in 1996, made waves in the World Cup host city of New York early in the tournament by floating a barge with a giant statue of Spanish winger Yamal in the East River near the Brooklyn Bridge when Spain played Uruguay on June 26.

OOH stunts play a “key role” in Adidas’ media plan, Murphy said, so his team knew they wanted to activate that way in at least some of the cities where matches were taking place. Since Adidas’s Home of Soccer fan event is set up at Brooklyn Bridge Park, with matches including Spain v. Uruguay playing on a big screen there, the team started floating the idea of doing a stunt on the water, Murphy added.

“It creates tons of social conversation because everyone can see it, both on the Manhattan side and on the Brooklyn side,” he said.

That major visibility could be part of the reason everything from barges to larger-than-life renderings of players has been popular among marketers this World Cup, Murphy told us. They tend to get lots of attention, he said, including from press, influencers, and athletes themselves.

Out of bounds

In addition to the Yamal barge in Brooklyn, Adidas has installed OOH activations in cities including Atlanta, Toronto, and Los Angeles. In Downtown LA, the brand erected a 3D billboard that depicts Messi kicking a ball across the city, which Murphy said has been a big win.

“The amount of people who are stopping on that corner to take pictures and push it out there, and then media picking it up, athletes who are picking it up because they’re at L.A. Live for events, was incredible,” Murphy said.

Adidas supplies the World Cup’s official match ball, the Trionda, so that’s also been a significant feature in the brand’s OOH efforts. In Vancouver, the dome of the Science World building was redesigned to look like the ball, and at Rockefeller Center in New York City, the iconic bronze Atlas statue has been transformed to feature a giant version of the ball on Atlas’s shoulders. The Trionda has even been to space, courtesy of NASA.

The Adidas team hasn’t completed its full results analysis yet since the tournament is still going on, but Murphy said one of the biggest goals is to “be the most talked-about brand during the World Cup.” The various stunts, he added, “have definitely helped us in that direction.”

Pure cinema

Adidas’s campaign film, which has a full five-minute version and several cutdowns, has also helped drive conversation around the brand, especially ahead of the tournament when it debuted in mid-May, Murphy said. While Adidas’s global marketing team across the US and Germany was largely responsible for the film, Murphy said his team had some input in terms of “making sure it has some North America–centricity.”

The idea behind the campaign was to merge culture and sport, he said—hence the casting of Chalamet and Bad Bunny alongside the soccer stars. Adidas has run its ads throughout the tournament, broadcasts of which have repeatedly broken viewership records in the US, and Murphy said he’s confident that “the impressions we get from this are going to be incredible.”

With such a significant investment in the tournament, Murphy and the Adidas marketers are aiming to encourage both brand conversation and “a tremendous amount of sales” on the business side, he said. Early signs point to probable success on both fronts, Murphy said, and there’s still more to come.

“I imagine that we will generate even more conversation and even more sales over the next seven to 10 days,” he said.