Sometimes it’s hard to stand out in a crowd. So where do you put the spotlight when you want people to pay attention?
That’s easy: on them.
Here’s the story. As one of the main sponsors of the Boston Marathon, adidas was looking for a way to create a more meaningful connection with participants and viewers — something that went beyond the standard freebies giveaway.
Working with their agency, Grow, they decided to push the limits of innovation and create a Personalized Video for each and every runner, congratulating them for their participation and giving them an opportunity to share their accomplishments in a customized showreel.
To up the ante, adidas wanted to include real race data and footage from the race for each runner.
This case study video (made from a simple prompt by our friendly AI video creator, Lucas) shows an overview of how the campaign worked, but we’ll dig into more of the details below.
How It Worked
Bringing this vision to life wasn’t simple. There were two key challenges that had to be addressed in order to make it a reality:
- Shooting the footage and matching it to each runner: This was covered by Grow, who used a team of 18 people and 8 cameras along the course to generate the footage and the RFID chip on each runner’s bib to match the footage to the runner.
- Producing and rendering 30,000 videos within hours of the race: This was covered by our Next Generation Video Platform, which is able to render videos in 100x real time while enabling full creative flexibility.
The combination worked.
Using the RFID chip in the bib allowed adidas not only to track race performance but also to accurately match the footage captured at each checkpoint to the runner and automatically pull that footage to be used in that runner’s Personalized Video.
And our intuitive platform allowed Grow to easily set up, launch and manage the campaign while giving them the tools to provide a hyper-personalized video for every runner. (We frequently work with agencies to enable them to wow their clients with Personalized Video at scale.)
“Our idea was to harness the power of 30,000 runners — generating data from the very race bibs that sport the adidas logo — and transform the entire race into a creation engine,” said Drew Ungvarsky, Grow CEO and executive creative director. “The result is an epic personal highlight film for every single runner who becomes part of the legend of this incredible event.”
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One key thing about this campaign was speed — and I’m not talking about the marathon runners. To give someone a personal highlight reel of their race is a wow moment, but it loses a lot of the luster if you give it to them a week after the event. The Boston Marathon is a huge event every year, drawing 500,000 spectators and garnering national media attention as well as social media chatter online.
If we wanted to culture-jack that moment, adidas needed to deliver the videos fast. That’s where our real-time rendering capabilities were essential. Once we had the data, our platform was able to quickly generate the Personalized Videos so they were ready the same day as the marathon. How’s that for a speedy turnaround?
And as always with our videos, the personalization was native to the video, meaning that the personalized elements were inserted before rendering rather than added afterwards as an overlay, resulting in the highest quality videos.
The final videos included the runner’s name, their times at different checkpoints in the race, personal clips of the runner taken at some point along the course and more.
Take a look at the finished result in this side-by-side video showing a couple examples.
Results That Win Big
So was it worth it? Absolutely.
While this campaign is considered relatively “low volume” in the world of Personalized Video — where volumes are generally measured in the millions rather than the thousands — it was a great showcase for an innovative application of the technology.
Campaign tracking reported that over 25% of runners who viewed their video shared it on Facebook, though social shares on other channels and through private messaging and offline channels puts this percentage even higher. (We know how much people love to use video to low-key brag. It’s OK. We’re all human.)
But even just the social sharing we could track drove hundreds of thousands of views with an astonishing 95% video completion rate. Not surprisingly, this social buzz was overwhelmingly positive.
Even more important, the campaign drove over 80,000 visitors to the company’s web properties.
The email campaign used to distribute the Personalized Videos also had an incredibly high open rate — more than double adidas’ benchmarks. And, perhaps most spectacularly of all, product sales driven by emails were up an astonishing 1,189%!
Off to the Races
Want to create a winning campaign like adidas did? To learn more about all that Next Generation Video can do, including personalization, interactivity, live data, AI and more, click below to schedule a demo.
