adidas & D&AD



In April the D&AD Shift class was invited to the adidas Homeground in Herzogenaurach to take on the challenge of creating a Marketing Campaign in under 24 hours.

Our Challenge was nothing less but to recreate 2006's “Sommermärchen” for the EURO 2024



An Overview of our Campaign for the EURO 2024



The Problem: In today's world football as we know it isn't as accessible anymore and doesn't make for great content on social media either. A lot has changed since 2006. Today we have costly streaming & sport club subscriptions. Also, Germany's football basis was eroded as many clubs needed to close down as a result of the recent crisis. On top of that Gen Z isn't known for being crazy about traditional football - but rather short clips on social media.

The Opportunity: We needed to find a middle ground to re-ignite the passion for football again.

In essence, we found the perfect opportunity space in street sports. Future Olympics will feature sports like breakdancing or skating. And what is the pendant to that in football?

Right! It's street football! Here we aim to create a space for generational exchange and social impact bringing young & old to #KickItTogether.

The Solution: To create a Sommermärchen in 2024 we proposed to..

• ..renovate street-football courts and build new ones in underrepresented locations,
• ..organize public viewings & events with football stars in street sport locations,
• ..give events & football clubs visibility through a digital map,
• ..create tutorials & challenges for tricks,
• ..bring it all together in their adiclub app.





But how did we got there?

My Role: Research, Facilitation & Concept

The evening started with the briefing after which we had an hour to discuss and interview our key-stakeholder to clarify any critical questions like "what is the budget for the campaign?" that would inform the direction of the campaign.





The day came to an end in the restaurant of the adidas Homeground but as facilitator the evening wasn't over for me, just yet..



The Night before the Hackathon



I broke down the brief and based on our initial conversation and the stakeholder interview, I created Research Questions for our group

I created these with the passion point model in mind and the constraints of our challenge like the overarching goal and key objectives for our client.

Research Questions covering the Passion Point model

• How do people get together / whats their barriers?
• What does diversity mean for adidas? Where is the focus in context of the world cup?
• Which sports are popular among Gen Z? What sports do they practice & are of interest?
• Why are sport clubs having problems these days and how can adidas help alleviate this?
• What did adidas do at previous campaigns that could inspire us?



The next day it all came together

We started by breaking down the brief again to collect every team member's view and discussed the approach we would follow for the next hours. I presented the Research Questions along with an comprehensive overview of the brief and gave the group ~45 minutes to collect what they could find.

Afterwards we presented our findings to one another, while I took notes.

Subsequently we synthesized our findings and aligned on one insight for each question.

In my role I was also responsible to timebox to keep the group on track as the conversation often drifted off to ideas, which we would come back to later on.





Our combined insights lead to our idea #KickItTogether

Next up I suggested to use Crazy 8, a quick method to iterate on our idea following the principle of "Alone, Together". However, the time pressure was real and we decided to skip this step and talk it out instead.

At this point our research gave us a solid informed direction already and we were more or less aligned as everyone was involved in the research.

From here on out we just needed to puzzle it together into one concept. Everybody on the team was 110% invested to make it happen.

We finished the pitch-deck just about 1 hour before the deadline. Just enough time for a few dry runs as at the pitch we only had 10 minutes (incl. questions) to sell the campaign to the client. Everything needed to be perfect.