For the launch campaign of Pureboost Go, the new adidas performance shoe built for city running, we piloted a set of digitally-driven, interactive moments throughout the store. Our goal was to promote discovery and trial of the performance apparel that supported the shoe launch.

While apparel accounts for 90% of floor space in the stores, customers naturally gravitate towards the footwear, where the value-propositions are more easily apparent. Even serious runners default to running in generic gear, so we had to get them to stop, take notice, and understand the potential of performance gear to supercharge their runs.

In addition to driving customer engagement with product, we were also challenged to establish technology platforms that could be refreshed with new content for future campaigns. We used this digital retail pilot to test customer reaction and operational feasibility for adidas.

We started by listening to our audience. We parsed over 1,700 reviews of running apparel on addias.com, 669k social posts, and 50+ in-depth interviews with runners in key cities. We wanted to understand how runners talk about their gear. We learned that rather than a calling out techology and materials when describing their gear, runners discuss how they felt during their runs. Ideally their gear disappears, becoming a second-skin.

To help customers get in the mindset of a run, we created an augmented-reality tablet app that let users interact with a life-size virtual runner. We wanted to visualize how adidas apparel would perform in the real world, under the conditions our customers would encounter in their own runs.

To build our augmented-reality experience, we started by motion-capturing real runners from the Pureboost Go campaign, and generating high-resolution 3D-scans of the product. We captured the raw motion data from the runners, so we could easily swap out product for future campaigns.

Inside the virtual world of the app, we gave users the power to choose different environments (heatwave, rainy days, and dark nights) and put the virtual runner through different actions (including warmup, cooldown, and a variety of running exercises). to see how apparel performs in different conditions. We also created a mobile web version to-go, for maximum shareability beyond the store.

Elsewhere in the store we built intelligent digital signage that shows customer reviews of and product highlights when customers pick up product. Atmospheric animated content brings the campaign to life at the moment-of-truth, and cross-sales messaging promotes traffic from the footwear wall to apparel racks.

Through in-store heat-mapping, customer exit interviews, and eye-tracking tests, we saw deep and extended engagement with the digital in-store touchpoints. The goal of the project was to pilot new interactive technologies and develop new platforms for product launch campaigns. We laid the groundwork and processes to bring these digital retail activations to global markets in the coming year. As a result, every adidas Running campaign now includes in-store video content created for interactive digital signage, based on the platform we created.