Adidas Cheats on MySpace with YouTube

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By Matt Clark

Adidas launched a YouTube marketing campaign to promote their new microbounce and megabounce shoe line. The YouTube channel, CanYouBounce, is fully branded and attempts to engage users in a fake competition where users vote for the King of the Bounce Champion. Adidas has loaded five videos of these Bouncer videos so far, each of which seems to be straight from Adidas’ TV ad campaign.

Launched at the end of March, the CanYouBounce channel has about 167 subscribers and 25,820 channel views. Their five videos, only about a week old, have a total of 822,530 views. That’s a great number and in most cases I would call it a success, however over 700,000 views came from their initial video launching the campaign. Since then views have dropped to around 11-40k. I also attribute much the initial success to Adidas strong cult brand.

Adidas set the bar for social media marketing with their original MySpace campaign, but The King of the Bounce leaves something to be desired. The channel does nothing to engage the users or make it their own. It’s a static page with only five videos to watch and a chance to vote for the fake Bounce characters.

This idea had the potential to be a nationwide marketing event, such as Red Bull FlugTag USA. Adidas should have put some money behind it and opened the competition up to the fans. They could have put up a small $10,000 reward to find a true King of the Bounce Champion. They could have let users (in their Adidas megabounces of course) submit videos to be part of the competition. They could have selected 50 finalists and sent out bounce suits to them for further video submission. They could have let channel subscribers vote on these finalists.

At the moment it’s nothing more than a grand prize drawing where Adidas and Foot Locker collects personal information for future marketing efforts. But they could have brought the top 10 together for what reminds me of a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots meets fake sumo event.

Adidas could have done a lot of things, but they didn’t. I’m not saying this is a bad campaign. It’s not a low-budget campaign, as the video advertising and YouTube channel probably cost a lot of money. But there were a few things they could have done differently. If you are going to set up a You Tube Channel, at least find a way to engage the user via online video.