Over the last 3 years, adidas have positioned themselves as the “Creator” brand across categories. A brand for those who have the imagination & guts to try new things, to lead rather than to follow, to shape culture rather than mimic. Both in the sporting arena and away from it.

In 2019, adidas Football were evolving their “Here To Create” proposition to “Dare To Create”, with a desire to provoke and polarise opinion.

Our objective was to drive boot sales & adidas NPS with a brief to launch the new “Exhibit Pack” range of football boots and this new “Dare to Create” proposition with a film-led activation featuring global adidas football players.

We saw an opportunity to talk about creativity in a new and provocative way which we felt would cut through…

adidas wanted to build on their “Creator” brand identity by declaring these new football boots as being for “Creators Only”.

We developed an idea that would celebrate Creativity by taking aim at its true enemy… Fakery.

We live in a world of fakery… from fake influencer bots & fake filters on social media, to fake news, to the posers who claim they “could’ve been a pro footballer”, and loudmouth trolls who reckon they could do better than the pros.

In our “Paul Pogba vs The Troller” film concept, we pitted one of these “Trollers” against the target of his abuse: €105m football megastar Pogba. After smugly hammering out derogatory tweets about Pogba’s form, our Troller is confronted by him in the street…

“Bro. You couldn’t even beat my mum!”

…cue Pogba’s Mum crashing the scene to humiliate the now-quivering troll with some nifty footwork. No boots for you, Mr Troll.

To land adidas’ new, “Dare to Create” proposition, we wanted to switch the brand’s line of focus on “Creativity”.

Creativity is amorphous, intangible and difficult to define. Our aim was to provoke & polarise to cut through a very saturated market and retail space so we defined & focused instead on Creativity’s enemy – Fakery.

Our audience of 16-21 year old football consumers are wired into anything and everything discussed on social media. “Trolling” is something they’ve grown up with & in their world, nobody is a better target for abuse than overpaid footballers.

These kids also all know the kind of Troll who’d claim they can take anyone on the football pitch, without the skills to back it up. In short, a “Faker”.

This was the foundation for our film – enlisting Pogba’s Mum to put the troll in his place, in the biggest “your mum” style putdown ever.

Films were rolled out over a 4-phase media rollout spanning a month, across adidas Football Online & Social Media channels.

We first teased the new product release and “Creators Only” tone of voice to generate hype for the product drop, before going onto release longer form 20-30’ & 45-60’ films with publishing support from the pro footballers who starred in them. Finally, with the “No Fakers / Creators Only” discourse firmly established, consumers were served product-focused films to convert views to sales, having already engaged with the other film content earlier in the funnel.

“Paul Pogba vs The Troller” went live in mid-January 2019 to support the release of the new “Exhibit Pack” Predator football boots. True to the narrative of the film, the primary channels were Instagram & Twitter, encouraging responses and conversation from our engaged audience in the Comments beneath.

We knew Pogba himself would be keen to support the film’s release given that it featured his real Mum alongside him.

Within the first 24 hours of the film going live on adidas channels and Pogba’s Instagram, we had accumulated over 3.5 million hits and over 6,000 comments on Social.

The film has gone on to garner over 14 million views, contributing to over 200 million views of the overall campaign content in the short time that it’s been live.

Other pro players (even including those sponsored by competitor brands) got involved, commenting on the video online and hailing Mama Pogba’s performance. The ad picked up headlines across major British and International Press including the Mirror, Daily Mail, Sun, Hypebeast and others.

NB. We’re still awaiting the full campaign report as the campaign is still live.