adidas Olympic—Together

Gold Winners

Television—Corporate Image

Title/Headline: adidas Olympic—Together
Name of Product/Service: adidas
Advertiser: adidas
Company: TBWA\China
Creative Director: John Merrifield, Yeo Yang, Elvis Chau, Sarawut Hengsawad, Lesley Zhou
Art Director: Elvis Chau, Nie Lang, Xia Zheng, Susie Sun, Amani Qian
Illustrator: Lu Ming Copywriters: Sarawut Hengsawad, Lesley Zhou, Nicky Zhang, Michelle Wu
Photographer: Mark Zibert

Main Objective: The campaign is about rallying the country and showing how the entire Chinese nation is supporting their athletes and the Game. But it’s more than just the crazed fans waving their national flags for the pride of the nation that so many other brands will be showing. We want to take an engaging approach. We want to inspire and enable the people onto the journey towards Olympic via helping them relate to the athletes as ordinary human being achieving the impossible.

Comments from Judges:

Liu Jun
CEO/ Executive Creative Director, Blue CreAd China (Mainland China)
The work for Adidas 2008 Olympic campaign is quite different among all the commercial ads related to the Games. The strong and clever contrast by the individual sports hero and vast population of a country can absorb people’s eye-balls definitely. There’s no doubt it really made a great impact on public during the hot period of sports.
Also the TVC’s content is coincident with Adidas’ core idea—impossible is nothing—which could strike a responsive chord in Chinese people at that special time.
(By the way, as a local judge coming from mainland China, I myself don’t think the Adidas 2008 Olympic campaign is good enough to get so many Gold Awards in different creative competitions. I just don’t enjoy its using of narrow nationalism to get public attention. May be there’s not much to do with creative point here. Sorry! )