Hasta La Creative!

At 5 p.m. on the Fourth of July, forty-odd members of Team Adidas are watching the kick-off of the Colombia vs. Brazil quarterfinal match on three flat screens from Adidas’ real-time marketing hub in Rio de Janeiro. A fourth screen tracks the most-searched players among the 100 or so World Cup athletes Adidas sponsors; it shows Colombian star James Rodriguez rise to the top of the list.

The war room is located at the Rio headquarters of Flamengo Athletic Club, one of the world’s most popular soccer teams. During the World Cup, the headquarters is home to Posto Adidas, a three-story retail space, media center, tech hub and rooftop VIP space — a gut renovation of an area that previously housed over 4,000 Flamengo trophies collecting dust.

It’s the biggest day yet at the month-long World Cup, and of Adidas’ months-long preparation to do real-time marketing on a sustained global scale. The winners of the days’ two matches — Germany against France, followed by Brazil against Colombia — will play each other in the semi-finals on Tuesday, July 8. Adidas is one of the tournament’s major sponsors, and it has spent the last year crafting an ambitious campaign to build the players and national soccer federations it sponsors — representing 9 of the 32 national teams that made it to the World Cup — into heroes that are “all In or nothing.” By this point in the tournament, the Adidas campaign slogan seems as appropriate for the marketers as it is for the surviving teams.

Continue reading at AdAge.com