Adidas: Leak don't launch

adidas, an athletic apparel and footwear brand, leaked its range of football kits by hiding them across the world in special places for each market to create interest and drive fans to the brand's e-commerce site.

Executive Summary

How do you take the ultimate patriotic product – the World Cup football shirts of national teams – and sell them to a new generation that doesn't do patriotism or that's not particularly morally aligned to the location of the latest World Cup… Qatar.

Against the backdrop of a declining replica kit market and a big-spending, market leading megabrand in Nike that had twice as many qualifying teams on it's books, planning turned the traditional global toolkit brief on its head.

This is a story of how strategy saw a big creative opportunity in a small task brief....

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