adidas Originals - Star Wars Collection
Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 13:23 - Brand adidas Originals
- Project Star Wars Collection
- Service Digital Outreach and Mobile Advertising
- Date 14 Jan 2010
- Headline #1 on Viral Video Chart
Background: Star Wars Collection
In January 2010, adidas Originals partnered with Star Wars to launch the über-retro, geektastic sneaker-fest that is the Star Wars Collection. The 60-second video below, featuring David Beckham, Snoop Dogg, Daft Punk, a Darth Vader cape, and an awful lot of red mist, kicked things off on 14 January.
Challenge: reach 18-24 year old men
Carat wanted the video to reach 18-24 year old men on trend, geek and movie sites. A reasonable enough request, though many such sites skew older than the desired target audience, so some care and attention was needed during the media planning process.
Solution: digital outreach and mobile advertising
Unruly Media executed a bespoke outreach programme for Carat, identifying and personally contacting bloggers who would connect with the content and present it to their readers in an engaging, natural way. Old skool, yes! But somehow thoroughly appropriate. We threw in some Star Wars fans for good measure: how could we resist? In addition, Unruly distributed the video on handpicked, youth-orientated mobile video applications to ensure a heavy skew towards a young 16-24 audience.
Result: #1 most shared video globally
- #1 on Viral Video Chart
- 897 blog posts, 2,028 tweets and 14,559 Facebook shares
- 1.2m plays
Unruly's outreach programme was extraordinarily effective at generating editorial placements on sites that occupy the hipster / geek intersection, including Prozac Champagne, Popwhore, TrendLand, and GeekTown and some fabulous personal sites like game designer Steve Odgen's blog. As you can see from the links, these are high quality, permanent placements generating real conversation among the sites' readers and contributing in a lasting way to search engine visibility.
It's interesting to see how the impact of our digital outreach rippled out across the blogosphere. Over on Geekologie, it took 22 separate reader tip-offs - yes 22! - before a post went up on 20 January, 6 days after we commenced digital outreach activity. But when it did, it generated a load of conversation in the comments and contributed over 34,000 views to the brand's upload on YouTube.
The quantity of reposts and retweets propelled the clip to the top of the Viral Video Chart, even beating Coke's Happiness Machine for several days and helping the video on its way to over 1m organic plays, the first real threshold of social video success.
Best of all, as the YouTube data shows below, the video did, even after allowing for a lot of spread, a surprisingly good job of hitting its target of a male, 18-24 UK audience.

Aside: the power of editorial placement
We've said it before and we'll say it again. The whole point of commissioning branded content is to move out of the ad space in the gutters and the margins of the page and into the content space where people spend their time and attention. To eschew worthless ad impressions that no one actually sees in favour of editorial space that provides a massively more engaging media environment, not just because people actually see it, but because people listen to, respect, and respond to the authorial voice of the writer who's bringing the content to their attention.

So far, so polemic.
But get this. On TrendLand, 2.29% of people who watched the video emailed the video to friends, on GeekTown, the recorded clickthrough rate on the video was 5.56%, and on GeekSpeak, a massive 14.29% of viewers shared the video on Facebook, Twitter or via email.
These rates aren't just impressive. They are one or two orders or magnitude higher than sharing and clickthrough rates generated outside of editorial placements and light years from the sorts of engagement rates generated by rich media banners.
You need this force to be with you.
Agency credits
- Creative: Sid Lee
- Media: Carat
- Distribution: Unruly Media
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