Redesigning global content planning for real-time social marketing

The Story

adidas wanted to be the fastest brand in the world. They wanted to be able to create real-time marketing in order to reach customers as fast as possible with the right message.

But to realise that dream, they needed to seriously speed up their content operations and systems. If they didn’t, brands like Nike and Under Armour would win the race.

They needed to reduce the amount of content they were duplicating across their global markets to make budget and time go further. In other words – do less, but better.

So we reinvented global ways of working for adidas’ social media and content teams. Using an atomised content strategy, we enabled local teams to deliver fast content in the right place, with the right message at the right time. Helping them to produce less but make it work a lot harder.

The Challenge

Nike and Under Armour were leading the social media race, and adidas were falling behind. They needed to unlock the potential of their global strategy, focusing on speed, cities and consumer-led content.

We identified that adidas’ investment in marketing technologies (Sprinklr and Percolate) wasn’t being put to best use. Specifically:

Budget was being wasted on duplicate platforms.
There was a lack of high-quality training.
There was an inconsistency of use across teams.
There was no governance around how content was tagged and used.

Only by making best use of their investment in marketing technology could they unlock the full potential of their global strategy.

What we did

We visited adidas’ global newsrooms and identified pain-points and duplication in the use of Sprinklr and Percolate across local and global teams.

We created a training and behaviour change programme to inspire their global team to use these technologies in a way that was mapped to the desired workflow of the newsrooms.

We rebranded adidas’ social products and services team, creating ‘Thread’ – a team whose function was to support newsrooms in driving innovation and managing the use of the technologies that power social.

The Results

Our work meant three major things for adidas:

1. Improved efficiency

adidas’ global newsroom teams now work concurrently alongside each other, rather than duplicating efforts across different markets. They have a better system for supporting local teams in rapidly delivering world-class, consumer-first content via social platforms.

2. Better content performance

Their spend on marketing technology is no longer a waste of budget, and offers them a significant ROI.

3. Reduced budget waste

adidas can serve more needs, using the same content. It gets used more and costs less. So they’re ahead in the race for being the world’s fastest brand.

500+

Thread users in business units in 7 worldwide newsrooms

10 million

Fans reached worldwide generating 270 million engagements

“Brilliant Noise have challenged our priorities and ways of working to enable us to have maximum impact in a fast-paced digital environment. Our previous approach meant we created the same campaign separately 11 times over for each market, and made different assets for each different channel. Brilliant Noise helped us create a centralised hub, produced one hero asset and message that was relevant for all markets and produced everything ready for localisation.”

Kris Ekman

Global Director Social Products and Services, adidas

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