Spring is getting near and you know what that means: love is in the air...for college basketball that is! As the college teams battle it out for spots in the Final Four, shoemakers are battling it out for shoe sales. Adidas has created a new basketball sneaker, Mad Clima, to be released in conjunction with March Madness.
In order to promote the new shoes, Adidas has launched an ad campaign called "March is a Brotherhood." One aspect of the campaign is a series of web videos featuring four of the NBA's top players including Tracy McGrady, Dwight Howard, Kevin Garnett, and Josh Smith. Each player chose a team to represent and is featured in their own short video clip about how their team will win. After watching the clips, I'm unsure about their potential effectiveness. So I wonder, will the video clips help make the campaign a success or will they get lost in the madness?
The videos are very short little clips, about 20 seconds long, with the players basically just showing off jerseys of the college they are representing. Howard took the Kansas Jayhawks, Garnett represents for the UCLA Bruins, McGrady is for the Louisville Cardinals, and Smith backs the Pittsburgh Panthers. Essentially, the players talk smack about the choices the other players made and how their team will beat the others.
Unfortunately for Adidas, I think the route they chose to take with these videos was far too casual. Although I believe that informal messages work (think reality tv and blogs) because they are more personal and relatable, I think this tactic will be ineffective. It seems like they were going for was an unscripted "reality" type theme. It's not that the videos are bad, but they're not memorable, which is exactly what short videos are supposed to be. What the ads are really for is the Mad Clima sneakers, but you neither see nor hear anything about them until a picture is shown at the end. The only clip that shows the shoes is Kevin Garnett's and they're not even on his feet. If Adidas is paying the players to make these clips, they could have at least been wearing the shoes.
Also, there's no correlation between the players and the teams they chose. None of them went to the colleges they are representing or are from the city where the college is located. Putting a celebrity face to a brand is typically a great technique, but it doesn't make much sense here. Hopefully there will be some follow up clips that bring the idea full circle.
What do you think? Are the video clips an effective tactic?
Posted by Leah Southers on March 18, 2009 11:56 AM
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