In a social media space already saturated with influencer content, adidas wanted to launch their lightest boot ever, the X19, leveraging one of their leading assets – the Egyptian king, Mohamed Salah

Our job was to make it happen in a new, and totally organic way, with a low-budget, high-engagement stunt that would stir intrigue among Salah’s followers and generate hype in the wider football community.

We knew Salah’s fans already thought of him as god-like, but what if the speed of the x19 could help him pull off a stunt worthy of this status?

What if Salah could run on water? And what if we made this appear to happen for real?

The goal was to create a guerrilla piece of content that would engage our audience in the places they were least expecting and prompt massive organic share.

This meant refraining from leveraging adidas and Salah’s own channels until the stunt had already gone viral.

We built an invisible runway under a remote private lake and shot two short films of Salah running out to fetch a ball he had kicked out into the water.

The first film was shot from the perspective of an unsuspecting fisherman, then ‘leaked’ to international media channels, stirring intrigue and driving fans wild as it was picked up across the globe.

A few hours later, Salah released the second film, shot as though it was filmed on his own phone, through his Twitter and Instagram channels, tagging adidas and #X19.

Within minutes the football community went wild for the content, sharing the post far and wide and labelling Salah a ‘True God’. Blanket media coverage followed with many bloggers and fans trying out the stunt for themselves, prompting massive spikes in positive social mentions of adidas and #X19.

• 69% increase in mentions of @adidasfootball

• 90% increase in positive sentiment in posts mentioning #x19

• 6.4 million views of Salah’s film, with over 22k comments

• 31.9 million impressions on the hashtag #X19.