🌊 Adidas Built a Swimmable Billboard. This is super nifty on a couple of levels. First, as you can see below, the billboard is just a cool-looking thing that won’t struggle to attract attention (which is its job). It’d be pleasing and different even without anyone in the water.
But let’s dive deeper, shall we?
This… poolboard (?) is part of Adidas’s Watch Us Move campaign, which aims to break “sport taboos” for women with a combination of new messaging and updated products. Both of those things really do come into play here with women’s swimming; the “new messaging” is aimed at the broader issues of body image and body positivity, and the “updated products” are directly addressing reasons that teenage girls are dropping out of the sport like flies (the big one is fear of period leakage).
It doesn’t seem like Adidas was really looking for an Easy Button here, which is a good thing. For starters, they did this spot in the UAE, which (let’s just say) hasn’t been the world’s brightest beacon of feminism.
Secondly, the swimming-pool billboard was the most outlandish idea that agency Havas had brought to pitch Adidas, and with zero clue of how they’d build it—but Adidas jumped at the idea anyway and gave them three weeks to figure it out. (They needed 32 people working day and night for three weeks straight to build the pool, but they got it done.)
Call us idealistic, but it seems like Adidas’s marketers have struck an excellent balance between serving the company and serving the customers. Yes, it’s still advertising and yes, they’re still trying to make more money—but if people are genuinely happy to trade with Adidas because the products solve problems and help them feel better about themselves, Adidas really will have made the world a better place.
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