For the launch of adidas GLITCH’s new football ‘Prep Pack’ boot range, we needed to create a campaign that matched up to the brand’s unrivalled football reputation, whilst driving app downloads, selling out pre-orders and maxing out hype in London.

We had to launch the Prep Pack street boots into London’s most apathetic audience – urban male teens. It had to be culturally on point, whilst communicating the unique heat reactive feature of the product, the harder you work the hotter the boot gets, reflected in the outer skin changing colour.

The pack was inspired by the hard work of training, which we knew is rewarded with serious play in London. So, we took GLITCH off the pitch and into a place our core audience of 14-19-year-olds, football playing Londoners, associate with a post-match reward – the local takeaway shop.

To create maximum authenticity and connection with our audience we decided to re-create the visual language of urban fast food culture in extreme detail, however, instead of serving chicken and chips we served up the freshest new adidas PREP boots.

This not only held up a mirror to the culture of our audience but also landed the unique qualities of the PREP pack, showcasing how they react to hot and cold by stacking them under heaters and in the fridges. To show the importance of hard work we offered a free pair to the first fifty people to arrive.

We targeted 14-19-year-old football playing Londoners via adidas’ social channels, the GLITCH App, influencer social channels (football and music), leaflet drops in the local area and DMs to local influencers.

We challenged the GLITCH community to demonstrate hard work by racing down to the shop to score free product and gain access to an exclusive performance from rapper Headie One. We teased the event across social in the preceding week, revealing the secret location on launch day, ensuring that only those who worked the hardest would get there first. By communicating through these channels and teasing this authentic content, we manufactured our own hype product drop, something usually reserved for lifestyle brands.

Despite a small budget the approach proved to be very efficient as it yielded an event experience, product store, brand statement and social film content all in one, where normally only one of these would have been deliverable.

Taking over a fast food restaurant in the heart of East London, we re-skinned the place entirely as GLITCH – rebranding every familiar touchpoint to create a hyper-authentic and legitimate takeaway shop, stacked with GLITCH product, exclusive apparel and topped off with a surprise performance from North London’s own drill rapper; Headie One.

First up was the ‘Flaming Boot’ takeaway shop identity, which also fed into the product’s ability to react to heat. We rounded it off with embroidered uniforms, wet-wipes, bags, boxes, napkins, in-store POS and of course, a large neon sign.

By fusing the power of ‘hype product drops’ with a music event wrapped in a meticulously crafted pop-up, we efficiently harnessed multiple cultural touchpoints within our audiences’ lives. We seamlessly landed product USP of ‘heat and cold reactivity’ into shop freezers, hot plates and neon lighting to create an easy to understand, rounded story.

Full sell-out of all product via pre-order within 9 hours.

4x capacity of the event space on the night.

1.27 million views across all channels within 6 hours.

420% increase of GLITCH app downloads.