But what about the shoes?
Harden Vol. 1 shoes sold out in 5 hours, making this the most successful basketball launch in adidas history.
And the rest?
@ProjectHarden followers were 3x more likely to comment and 2x as likely to engage on multiple posts.
Average cost per engagement was 14% lower than adidas benchmarks.
The scoreboard told the story.
Clio Silver for Single-Platform Campaign, 2017
Shorty Winner for Best Use of Instagram, 2017
Rosey Winner for Online Advertising, 2017
Swift goes directly to the consumer to get genuine, of-the-moment insights that are unexpected and powerful enough to spark an entire, award-winning campaign.
Mark Rasoul adidas Global Brand Marketing
The crossover.
Building on the success of Harden, adidas asked us to bring flair to the game of fakes and fadeaways for All-Star 2017.
It was time to go back to the consumer. Interviews and research led to an unconventional insight:
Instead of using social to drive traffic to events, design a great offline experience to fuel buzz in social.
Flipping the script.
We transformed a New Orleans warehouse into a maker’s paradise where visitors could create and post art in real time.
Followers got of-the-minute intel and inspo they couldn’t get anywhere else.
Creativity unbound.
We recruited artists from around the country to interpret All-Star activities as they unfolded.
Adidas owned the second largest share of brand-relevant tweets during All-Star, significantly closing the gap on the competition.
James swung by the Hoops Collective and spotted a pair of hand-painted Hardens he had to have. Adidas got double exposure when he rocked them in the game.
The ultimate endorsement?
747 Experience@ All-Star 2018
We were back at courtside in 2018, connecting fans to an immersive two-day extravaganza (dubbed 747) celebrating the wildest, funniest and best of basketball culture.
All-in for All-Star Weekend
Our challenge: Bring the hype in social before and during the event.
Working with a crew of 45, we embedded with the client and set up a mobile newsroom to capture the rapid-fire weekend lineup: product drops, panel discussions, a court designed by Pharrell Williams, and of course, Snoop Dogg v. 2 Chainz in All-Star’s first hip-hop hoops battle.
We edited in real time and pushed out exclusive content on 5 global social channels.
And the crowd goes wild.
Views and engagement rates soared past benchmarks.
Best of all, adidas narrowed the voice gap with competitors from 10:1 to less than 4:1.
To launch Vol. 3 of Harden’s shoe in 2018, we developed mysterious visual stories aligned with five colorway releases.
Voyager
Cosmos
Mission
Invader
Supernova
To hype the styles, we took fans on an insider journey behind the scenes of an epic Harden studio shoot with legendary basketball photographer Atiba Jefferson.
