RSS
 

Adidas viral videos

02 Dec 2008

Last week Adidas released a bunch of viral videos: some of them are quite good, some of them really aren’t. We saw Arsenal’s Emmanuel Adebayor playing Snake with his football shoes, Madrilista Arjen Robben with his magical footgear and Chelski midfielder Michael Ballack trying to shoot through a hoop.

The viral that got the most views and the most buzz was this clip of Liverpool icon Steven Gerrard shooting at clay pigeons with his teammate Xabi Alonso at the Liverpool training pitch. Advertising agency 180\TBWA Amsterdam claims that they didn’t use any kind of computer manipulation for this clip. For some people that’s good enough to believe Gerrard actually hit the pigeon. But I’m not some people, I don’t believe it!

The camera phone effect should contribute to the credibility of the clip but for me it does exactly the opposite. The effect should make us believe that this video isn’t staged by Adidas (or it’s advertising agency), that Gerrard and Alonso are just kicking footballs at clay pigeons for a few hours and that a fan was filming this the entire time with his cellular phone. For me it would be more convincing if they dropped the amateur look. It would be more credible if Adidas just came clean and admitted that it’s partly staged: that they asked Gerrard to shoot at clay pigeons for a commercial, just hoping he would hit one after a few tries and that he actually did it eventually.

In France Adidas gave us some better stuff: they put French goalkeeper Steve Mandanda in the showroom of the Marseille Adidas store. Actually it wasn’t the real Mandanda, it was a holographic clone of the goalie. The ad agency also put a Making Of clip online, which is pretty smart because the holographic goalkeeper now leads a second life on the internet. As far as I’m concerned, this trick is way better than the 4 other virals combined.

 
1 Comment

Posted by Yannick in Advertising

 

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

  1. Bloggy Rob Blogland

    December 8, 2008 at 4:01 pm

    I agree with you. Definitely fake, the clay pigeon snaps into 2 from the ball gerards head moves in the way, then it mystically is never seen again to be replaced by a smiling gerard at the camera.