Adidas and High Schoolers Win with Hashtags

byHoward Davidson, Arlington, MA

Slide By :- Howard Davidson Arlington MA

Adidas and High Schoolers Win with Hashtags

Adidas rolled out a clever campaign that has high schoolers using hashtags to help the company win marketshare and mindshare.

The campaign is smart.  It’s set up like a March madness bracket and  pits 16 high school football teams from around the country against one another, with the entire winning team receiving pairs of Adidas’ new Adizero cleats.   Essentially, the campaign has high school football players across the U.S. to vote for the most cleat-worthy of 16 schools via Twitter and Facebook.

Slide By :- Howard Davidson Arlington MA

Adidas plays hard with marketing on and offline.  With the help of the Chirpify platform, Adidas came up with a brilliant voting system that engages and retains savvy higher school students so that they become brand influencers..   Only high school football players can vote, the idea being that the “spirit of competitiveness” will drive players to vote for a friends school, or against rivals, all the while publicizing a products desirability, exclusively to and by the products target demographic.  Aah, sweet peer pressure at play.

Slide By :- Howard Davidson Arlington MA

• Like most peer-to-peer marketing campaign, Adidas is relying on players to evangelize the brand.  Friends will nominate friends from other high schools to spread the word organically, and so on.

• The whole idea is pretty damn smart.  It’s a creative use of Twitters viral nature, it doesn’t waste capital by unintentionally advertising to people who will never buy football cleats (i.e. almost all of us), and considering how manipulative it actually is, the campaign doesn’t come off that way.

• Within two weeks of launching the campaign, Adidas gained an additional 100,000 Facebook followers, and counting…

Slide By :- Howard Davidson Arlington MA