2016 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

We discovered that there’s a dark side to our football conversations on social platforms. The issue dubbed ‘trolling’ is about our star players subjected to rampant abuse and harassment by the public. We uncovered a truth about competitive sports: that attracting criticism and abuse is a sign that you’re doing something right. In fact, the best players go one further - provoking a response from those around them to keep their edge. What if we could turn hate into a product feature and use it to sell F50 boots ?

Results and Effectiveness

By being divisive and engaging the audience the campaign had the greatest organic reach of any adidas online campaign to date. We argued that There Will Be Haters isn’t about haters – it’s about building confidence in your own game. - YouTube accounted for 67% of overall views with 6.5 mn views delivering 36.6M impressions - Facebook accounted for 23% of video views with 2.2M views while reaching 13M users across MENA - Twitter generated 1.9M impressions with 148K engagements. - Yallkoora & Koora: we were able to generate 14.5 mn impressions effectively blocking Nike during the campaign period

Creative Execution

We kicked of the conversation with a film featuring the most hated footballers Luis 'Target Man’ Suarez, Gareth ‘Superhuman’ Bale. James ‘Goldenboy’ Rodruiguez. Karim ‘Blingy Benzy’ Benzema. We used trolls on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook responding to everything they said using #Therewillbehaters. We took the conversation beyond social media - using formats like front page newspapers and magazines, billboards. We even gave people a chance to create their own , We created mall activations across the region to enable fans to take their ‘haters’ selfies which were then shared on ‘troll’ platforms like Twitter.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

How do you launch boots for the 14-19 year olds ? It’s usually about the beautiful stuff – speed, product features, technology. After all, these were the category truths. But when everyone is talking about the same stuff, how do you stand out and differentiate yourself? More importantly, how do you own the brand conversation in a meaningful way? We took a truly breakthrough approach by doing something no other brand would dare think of- talking about the bad stuff. Product features are still important but peer validation & social conversations played a key role in the final purchase decision.