Boot launches are tired. It’s getting harder to engage young audiences who increasingly ignore product pushes. This is because the football community don’t expect anything new from this industry; they see boot launch content as wallpaper.

On top of this, we know the next generation of football fans don’t view storytelling on social as a linear process; brands increasingly need to adopt a cross-platform approach so the audience can begin mid-narrative and travel between brands and influencers with ease.

Our brief was to harness the power of football fandom to dial up brand and product awareness for adidas ahead of their Predator #missnothing campaign and boot drop.

Key objectives:

Re-engage a football audience, tired of boot launches,

Acquire the next generation of football fans on social,

Land the key Predator product benefit of accuracy ahead of the official launch

Target: 250k organic likes and 100m social impressions

Rather than replicate every other brand trying to sell football boots, we activated content creators and influencers within the cultural moment of Transfer Deadline Day to carry the product message in a way our community had never seen before. A 24 hour thunderclap of community-led creative. Our ambition was to change the way boot launches are consumed by a social-first football audience by using influencers to share the clues that would capture their attention before dropping the announcement to a captive audience.

On social, timing is everything. And with the official boot launch happening the week after Transfer Deadline Day, we wanted to target this key date in the European football calendar to co-create a spider-web of bait dropping influencers to post and engage in each other’s posts to fan the flames of misinformation and get everyone talking about adidas Football and Predator #missnothing ahead of the boot drop.

In an era of fake news, Gen Z value accuracy more than ever. And on Transfer Deadline Day, misinformation is rife. It’s a day synonymous with rumour and counter-rumour as football fans see hyper accuracy as the ultimate social currency.

Our community management strategy was to seed clues and put the brand’s message in the hands of the influencers our community pay the most attention to for accurate news, activating content creators like leakedlineups and the ultimate transfer influencer Fabrizio Romano because we knew our audience would be refreshing their feeds. Our approach was to hijack the cultural significance of Transfer Deadline Day by flipping the Predator boot’s primary feature of accuracy on its head and play our community’s behaviour on social right back at them. We co-created content with carefully chosen influencers, and collaborated on community management to fuel the fire of #missnothing on multiple channels in 24 hours.

On a day where everyone should be talking about players and clubs, we owned the conversation across multiple platforms. We didn’t just achieve against our benchmarks and objectives, we created a new, innovative way to co-create with influencers and sell football boots. Proving that boot drops no longer need to feel like social wallpaper, shifting brand perception for adidas.

5.5M+ views in 24 hours

150m+ impressions in 24 hours

609,527 likes in 24 hours

Fabrizio Romano’s post received 30k+ engagements in 1 hour

#missnothing trending across European markets on Twitter

During the day we were flooded with comments from football obsessed social sleuths desperate to connect the dots of our influencers’ clues. After the day finished, we were inundated with positive sentiment as users called out our “brilliant marketing” as we “got influencers like leakedlineups involved” and activated “Fabrizio Romano at primetime on today of all days.”