Adidas is celebrating originality through “creative collisions” in its latest global brand campaign.
“Unite All Originals,” promoting the brand’s Originals line, launched on March 5. Developed by Montreal-based global AOR Sid Lee, it focuses on showcasing the brand’s diversity through the many different styles and cultures. It’s a digitally lead effort centred on the “Adidas Collider,” an online application that enables users to immerse themselves in a bevy of original content produced through several “collisions” (i.e. surprising and unexpected collaborations) of international artists from various disciplines.
“We want to make the brand evolve,” says Jean-Francois Dumais, a creative director at Sid Lee. “We want to make it reflect the universe that the kids we’re trying to talk to are in now. A lot of them are on the internet 24/7 where these collisions are always happening, and they are the ones making these collisions and sharing them.”
Sid Lee also wants “Unite All Originals” to foster creativity and innovation in the brand’s young target audience.
“We have always celebrated originality and our ability to be relevant for everyone’s lifestyle,” said Alexander Matt, global brand marketing director for Originals. “We want to bring originality to the next level, and with the collisions we believe that we create something truly new. As we have organic relationships with a variety of artists across all genres it wasn’t hard to convince us and our partners that it would be best to bring them together to explore new things they haven’t done before.”
The launch of “Unite all Originals” featured the debut of a 90-second “hero film” that is a collision in itself, combining the talents of two of the campaign’s more renowned artists – DJ/producer A-Trak and director/visual artist SoMe. The video mixes animated imagery with reality, and layers images to symbolize what happens when originals collide. It features a redux of the A-Trak song “Landline,” which was composed using ambient sounds from the video footage.
Print ads and animated GIFs that depict the new Originals collection are also part of the promotional mix, as are a 30-second version of the video appearing on TV in select markets, and PR. Street-level activations are being planned and in August the brand intends to unveil more creative collision from partnered artists.
