Adidas to maximise real-time marketing opportunities
Adidas UK is looking to bring more immediacy to its online conversations with fans after assembling a team of creatives dedicated to responding quickly to news events.
The sports brand’s ‘moments of celebration and acknowledgment’ strategy aims to accelerate its shift to real-time marketing by having social media teams in place to react within minutes of key sporting moments.
All decisions will be made in real-time during the events with marketers, artists and agency members all working together to create tactical campaigns around sports fans’ conversations.
Adidas is hoping the combination of speed and cultural relevance can propel its social media messages to the forefront of online conversations in a similar way to Oreo’s reaction to the Super Bowl blackout.
Reactive efforts will compliment rather than replace pre-planned executions as the brand looks to produce compelling and shareable content.
The company is the latest to adopt a real-time marketing strategy with marketers investing heavily in data collection and analysis systems to create creative campaigns within minutes rather than months. Last month, Carlsberg centralised its social media marketing in a bid to tap into the real-life stories involving all its brands.
The sportswear maker has been planning for this shift for the last two years. The strategy builds on Adidas’ reactive approach around the London 2012 Games, which saw it make last minute changes to tactical ads in response to Team GB’s achievements throughout the event.
It helped lift perception of the brand at the time. Adidas emerged the clear winning among official sponsors of the Games, according to YouGov BrandIndex data, with its sponsorship activity leading to a spike in positive sentiment about the sports brand.
The strategy is being supported by the UK team’s roster of agencies including Work Club and We Are Social with the majority of creative being and developed and delivered in-house.
It comes as the company promised a major drive in product innovations to spur sales for the rest of 2013 after revealing a 2 per cent drop year-on-year drop in first-quarter sales earlier today (3 May).