The story

We reinvented global ways of working for social media, to support their ambition of becoming the world’s fastest brand. Alongside this we devised a strategy to enable local teams to deliver fast content in the right place, with the right message, via their global newsrooms.

What was at stake?

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.

Our work

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.

As a result

• adidas’ global newsroom teams now work concurrently alongside each other, vastly increasing their output.
• adidas have an ongoing strategy for their use of Sprinklr and Percolate that supports local teams in rapidly delivering world-class, consumer-first content via social platforms.
• adidas’ spend on marketing technology is no longer a waste of budget, and offers them a significant ROI.