Title	ADIDAS GLITCH
Brand	ADIDAS FOOTBALL
Product/Service	ADIDAS GLITCH
Category	D02. Use of Co-Creation & User Generated Content
Entrant	IRIS London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation	IRIS London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation 2	POSSIBLE Seattle, USA
Production	IRIS London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production 2	POSSIBLE Seattle, USA

Name	Company	Position
Michael Barrett	iris	Global Planning Direct
Laura Jane Justice	iris	Senior Producer
Iain Robson	iris	Creative Director
Mariana Lobos	iris	Senior Designer
Nico Tuppen	iris	Managing Director
Simon Yoxall	iris	Board Director
Tarik Bedevi	iris	Senior Art Director
Ric Blank	iris	Senior Copywriter
Jasmina Cigoja	iris	Account Executive

The Campaign

GLITCH is both a brand new football boot concept AND a brand new route to market for adidas. The product itself features an inner shoe for perfect fit and a laceless outer skin that offers perfect ball control, but is also interchangeable allowing players to express their own style. The designs, the name, the packaging, the launch – every single facet was co-created with football influencers. They fed back on every aspect and made choices that were bolder, pushing the boundaries of the brand. They sat in the room with adidas, their agencies and creatives. They owned it. At launch they gave out unique codes to let fans access (and purchase). And they still have an active role in running it. Influencers attend all fitting sessions on the pitch with new customers. They man the support channel. And contribute their own content to help drive and engage the GLITCH community.

Creative Execution

This new football boot is ONLY available for purchase through a mobile app, designed and built for the new football stars - urban street players whose freestyle play is as dependent on the style as it is the score. We intentionally started small, with a core group of influencers and urban footballers in London. This allowed the community to grow gradually and organically without abusing the reach of our contributors. Influencers were empowered and highly engaged throughout, actively helping to shape the community by deciding who became a part of it and contributing towards the customer support and homepage sections of the app with peer-to-peer advice, product demos and promotional User Generated Content. There were reward and value exchange mechanics built into the app too, encouraging interaction and engagement to exist beyond a single purchase with free skins and extra referral codes on offer for the most active users.

GLITCH trended immediately and boots were selling fast without any media spend. Players took to social media begging for referral codes from their contacts. We made it into the ‘HOT this week’ list in the app store in our first week. Boots were being sold at 3x markup on eBay. We even saw access codes being auctioned. Despite the controlled release, the GLITCH app has had over 107K downloads. adidas GLITCH already has over 100 thousand links (Google search) and tens of thousands of videos (YouTube). Every single video is an influencer or customer creation. NONE of them are made by adidas. Just by being involved in the seeding, our influencers social reach extended – gaining extra views and followers in their thousands. GLITCH was a true collaboration, with huge rewards for the brand and the community they engaged.

We avoided classic channels and decided to focus on Mobile and influencer led Social activity. Our audience was heavily into digital and social media and big on mobile usage, so we didn't focus our efforts on the traditional media channels typical of a football boot launch. Instead we involved our audience right from the beginning and based our strategy around them. Utilising the power of the influencer to generate interest with relevant social media and user generated branded content which matters to them.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Around 90 young players were identified as “creators” and invited by the adidas brand to help pre-test the product, critiquing and improving it at every stage right up to the launch. They then produced the content that sits on the app homepage and were given control of invite codes to seed the product with their fans. Approximately two dozen players are now working for the project on an ongoing basis, either by providing customer service support, attending fitting sessions or being involved in content and product creation. adidas call it an ‘open source’ philosophy. The whole project is based on the belief that you can only create genuinely cool products if you bring in creative thinkers from a whole range of different fields, merging agencies and brand owners with influencers and players, letting them impact the product by giving them scope to develop their ideas.