Challenge

Adidas came to us to launch their new high performance trainer, the AlphaBounce BEYOND. In the US, it's positioned for basketball training, and in Europe, it's associated with football training. They have promotional photography featuring superstar athletes, but without access to them, we needed a different creative approach to the audio execution.

Insight

Becoming a professional athlete takes years of sweat and dedication. Ups, downs, trials and tribulations. Tens of thousands of hours of ugly, sweaty drills. But you don’t see that on TV when Gareth Bale scores a last-minute winner.

Idea

What does it take to become a professional athlete? Dreams of a stadium erupting aren’t enough. You've got to put the work in, and you've got to want it. So, if you’re only training for the fame and the glory, then you’re doing it wrong.

Execution

We wanted to showcase a young footballer’s journey to the top using immersive 3D audio, showing how his commitment and creativity lead to his big break. All supported by the ultimate performance training shoe; the Adidas AlphaBounce BEYOND.

And we wanted to bring the story to life using only diegetic sound, with every sound effect in the ad being a genuine sample from the world of football. This is a world first.

We used minimal voiceover to let the sound design play centre-mid, with the sounds of the training ground and the gym building cadence around the listener - panning left, right and circling - as they become fully immersed in the action. The rhythms then start to overlap and crescendo to form an energetic, boombastic track as our hero reaches his goal and runs the game. 

The rhythm is broadly 4/4, with a VO line punctuating each bar.

Results

The entire campaign generated over 500 unique Adidas playlists, delivering a CTR of 0.66 and delivering 4,746,096 total impressions across the duration of the wider campaign.