Guerilla Gardening with Adidas
I saw the video below at the cinema this week; it’s all about guerilla gardening (that’s going out and planting things around a city) and the information is bought to you by Adidas Grün
It’s all to promote their latest range of trainers.
Adidas Originals is proud to present adidas Grün, a collection that aims to better the environment by efficiently utilizing the natural resources of this world. With three guiding elements of “Made From”, “Recycled” and “Reground”, adidas Grün offers a range of products, including classic silhouettes like the Forum basketball sneaker and the ZX 500 runner, all made from recycled and natural materials
Not knowing a lot about Adidas, I’m not sure if this is just an attempt at greenwashing, or is a long-term strategic effort on behalf of the company to change their approach. They’re getting a lot of PR about the range though, which can only help. Looking at the mentions on blogs and sites, they’ve been targeting fashion and green sites. One thing that becomes very obvious reading through all the mentions is that in most cases it’s a matter of adding an image and copying the press release - do any of these sites ever do more than that? This is just distributed news repeated over and over in far more places than you could have got with paper-based media. There’s very little additional commentary on the launch, although the odd one does sneak through, such as at shape and colour, who shows the lovely outdoor installations that Adidas has out there. (i can’t find an available picture, but there’s more on Flickr. They’re also supporting actual activity, such as this co-promotion with JuiceFM in Merseyside to green up some spaces
The video is up on the usual sites, for exampleYouTube, bebo, or DailyMotion. I’m not sure how many of the placements are ‘official’ but the comments seem far more genuine than most of the blog placements!
Yeah f-off Adidas, like we need some corporation which makes massive profits from sweatshop labour and sells us products at stupidly inflated prices preaching to us on social responsibility
I like the campaign, it’s got some really clever touches and does make you think about doing stuff - guerilla gardening is a growing trend, I’ve seen it on primetime TV a few times in the last few months. As for the product, I bought my last set of trainers about 2 years ago, so probably not really in the target market!
Tags: adidas, adidas grunRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Advertisments, Buzz Marketing, Integrated and Transmedia Marketing, Outdoor Advertising and Experiences
2 opinions for Guerilla Gardening with Adidas
Richard Reynolds
May 10, 2008 at 8:44 am
Adidas’s ‘guerrilla gardening’ campaign is a superficial exploitation and appropriation of the movement which I really hope doesn’t confuse people about what it takes to genuinely guerrilla garden. I say this because last September their UK agency sent me an 8 page story-boarded script for a ‘documentary’ stuffed full of images lifted from my website and requested I help them cast under 25s in this film. It was a load of glossy fakery and I said “NO WAY”. They pressed on anyway and the results are now in cinemas all over the place. Look closely though, not only are they all wearing Adidas, but they’ve magically planted full grown sunflowers and fruiting trees and stuffed everything together as if it was a flower arrangement in a Hello home. This is horticultural nonsense, it’s guerrilla gardening as a makeover TV show … and it’s quite likely the plants are plastic. Yes plastic, despite the shoes they’re meant to be selling being “low on plastic”. I’m suspicious because they’ve planted plastic elsewhere in this campaign. The giant Adidas shoe on a billboard in Old Street over the last few weeks, which was described as guerrilla gardening, was in fact made almost entirely of plastic plants! The only real stuff was some lichen which they’d spray painted blue (just to make sure it was dead I suppose). As for guerrilla, well when did paying thousands of pounds for ad space be guerrilla gardening or even guerrilla marketing?!
By incredible coincidence I have a book out right now called ON GUERRILLA GARDENING, so fortunately my activity and my book is getting a bit more publicity in the UK than Adidas’s confused Grun stuff. And I hope my coverage about guerrilla gardening clarifies what Adidas are not conveying in their tokenistic campaign. There is one good part of their campaign, which very few will see or know about. Adidas are giving away seeds in their shops. Go in and help yourself to the bags and bags of the stuff. I think the ones I got are Hollyhocks. It’s a lovely idea and they should have made a cinema ad about that rather than a silly fake documentary… but let’s hope they’re not GM bred to grow into giant Adidas logos!
If you want to read the 8 page dirge Adidas’s agency sent me for the fake documentary you can download it from my website here:
http://www.guerrillagardening.org/media/adidas_fake_doc.pdf
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