Why being the most shareable football brand is so important to Adidas
To see the article in full visit The Drum. Below is the summary and includes data provided by Burst Insights.
Adidas has claimed it is the most shareable brand amongst its fiercest rivals and fellow Euro 2016 sponsors over the summer of football, citing its dominance of shares as the best gauge of its performance on social media.
Shares or so-called vanity metrics are often deemed superfluous but Adidas believes they are good proxy for quality of a sponsorship campaign. People are only ever going to share content if it’s something they believe in and so what counts as a vanity metric depends only on what constitutes success. For the sportswear brand, success is being the most talked about by young football fans, a goal its claiming as the football season comes to a close.
A share is a seal of approval
According to its own analysis, the sportswear brand generated over 1.6m shares across Twitter, (retweets), Facebook (shares), YouTube (direct shares and shares to other social platforms), Instagram (user tags) and online media (shares to social platforms) between the Champions League final, the Copa America and the Euros 2016 tournaments.
Most of that engagement came during the latter (1.1m), when Adidas said it dominated the daily share of volume for 27 of 30 days of the event, which yielded 1.17m shares — “more than twice the number of the next biggest brand”. Nike, Puma, Under Armour, Coca-Cola and the other Euro sponsors were the advertisers the German business claimed to outmuscle over the last two months.
Some 17 accounts worldwide were responsible for driving that volume, though there was no global paid support, with just small pockets of spend in certain key markets. All of which meant that around 95 per cent of the engagement was organic, the business said.
“A ‘like’ is a seal of approval in social currency terms so it’s not a surprise to see the Adidas campaign come first amongst the Euro 2016 social brand advertisers in the eyes of many,” said Mike Litman, chief executive of social video analytics business Burst Insights.
The positive association of being the kit maker for some of the tournament’s most popular teams (Wales) and sponsors of some of its biggest players (Paul Pogba) saw the shareability of Adidas’ content swell markedly during the matches. From GIFS to short video clips, the brand sliced and diced its content in real-time in order to make sure that everything was tailored to each specific channel. All this was done under the brand’s #FirstNeverFollows campaign which saw it apply a “boots blitz” strategy according to Litman, made up of a high volume of short social video content.
Adidas’ dominance of the brand chatter around the tournament was backed by Burst Insights, which found it upped its retweet and like engagement scores by 100 per cent and 112 per cent respectively during the tournament compared to its previous all-time bests. Interestingly, the amount Adidas posted to social for the Euros equated to around 5 per cent of all the posts it has published.
