Predator Instinct: The Game
adidas
Issue 35 | June 2015
Agency
TBWA\London
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Peter Souter Executive Creative Director Jeremy Carr Creative Directors Nick Tidball Steve Tidball
Production Team
Event Producer Andy Ashton Designers Nick Tidball Ben Koppel Construction Scruffy Dog Digital Producer Stuart Davis Website Media Monks Director Walter Campbell DOP Matt Shaw Editors Nick Gilberg Sai Shanmugarajah Head of Broadcast Broadcast Poppy Manning Production Company Producer Miles Wilkes Post Production MPC / SPOV Music Supervision Dave Bass Platinum Rye Music Composition Michael Powell Prodigious
Other Credits
International Account Director David Barton Account Director Jon Topping Account Manager Tom Lamming
Date
August 2014
Background
When adidas wanted to launch their new Predator Instinct boots, they understood their real competition wasn't other football boots. It was gaming.
The previous ten years in the UK had seen a drop-off in kids playing football as they turned instead to Playstation and Xbox to get their kicks.
To persuade them to get off their sofas, where they were playing FIFA, and onto grass wearing boots, the idea was to talk to them as if this was the launch of the next big Halo or GTA experience.
Idea
To take on computer games, the idea was to create a life-size, real computer game experience in a warehouse in London.
Each player's mission was simple. Get the ball from one end to the other and score. And do it fast. And don't get shot by predators armed with AK47 laser guns.
The result was a live, branded, interactive game, which started and ended online but which for 7 days existed in the real world, producing bucket-loads of teenage sweat, effort and fear.
Every part of the installation was designed to look and feel like a computer game – from the online invitations to play, the secret game maps, the costume design, and the actors' scripts to the architecture itself. Lighting and sound design and the way they were moved from one space to another within the experience by a team of actors made gamers feel they were trapped in a real-life version of Halo.
At the same time, every game was a product trial since all players had to wear predators in order to defeat the enemy and win.
Results
Launched online and on the streets with secret maps and hidden codes, the game was sold out in 24 hours. Within 48 hours it had been oversubscribed twice over.
News of the event reached five million people in the UK during its run, was 'liked' over 250,000 times on Instagram, and went on to hit another 27 million football fans across Europe as it achieved coverage in every market.
Finally, sales of Predator Instinct boots were three times higher during and after the event than adidas had forecast, with conversation around the game keeping them front of mind when young football fans reached the shops.
Our Thoughts
As TBWA’s PR blurb says about this idea, it ‘turned every player into the hero of their own epic quest and successfully repositioned the boots as deadly weapons.
It is a terrific example of fighting tech with tech, creating a real game better than any virtual game to get teens interested and excited. As Sun Tsu wrote a thousand years ago, ‘Know your enemy’.
What is brave about this is the expectation that players would tell their own stories to their social networks and that’s how the message would spread. That takes clients who really understand social media and, other than at adidas, there still aren’t many of them.