ASICS Running

Social media conquesting, Twitter fails, and community building.

In the footwear industry, there’s Nike and Adidas… and then a wide gap before everyone else. On the other side of that gap, you’ll find great brands like ASICS that specialize in certain categories but don’t quite have the overall dominance and cultural presence that you’ll find with the top two.

Working with ASICS, I led our creative teams and developed two digital engagements to help close the gap and to re-establish dominance in ASICS’ core categories—high-end running and training.

As Nike+ gained traction, we noticed that runners were posting their runs to social channels (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)—and that each post would list the distance and time of their run. This data was incredible valuable, but was being shared without concern for who might see it (and what they might do with it). Luckily, I have a devious streak. The upcoming launch of the Kayano19—the fastest, lightest, and most efficient Kayano ever—was the perfect opportunity to try something audacious.

Since the Kayano is a shoe that can objectively and definitively help you run faster and farther, I asked a simple question: What if we could find people sharing their Nike runs and give them a customized experience, showing how they could run faster and farther in a better shoe?

By creating a custom social scraping app, we aggregated all Nike+ posts that included distance and/or time—then sent customized messages to those accounts, along with a link to a custom landing page that showed how much faster and farther they could run in the Kayano19. It was a bold social conquesting campaign, turning Nike’s social dominance into a weapon for ASICS’ superior products.

The campaign also included digital video content (which I wrote and directed on a shoestring budget), social aggregation, user-generated tips/suggestions, and retail connections.

The second effort for ASICS was a training platform that allowed athletes to create their own custom playlists of workouts and exercises from some of the top cross-fit gyms in the country. By saving and sharing playlists (or by using pre-set workouts from athletes like Lolo Jones), users could build their own training communities and followings.

Agency: Struck
Creative Director: Matt Anderson
Digital Design Director: Abe Levin
Account Director: John Gross
Art Director: Phil Smallwood
Writer: Matt Anderson

Hi. I’m Matt Anderson — a creative director, agency leader, and strong advocate for diversity/equity/inclusion. I live in Portland, OR. If you’d like to work together, let’s talk.