70 years of adidas - branding, creative direction and employee activation

In 2019, adidas celebrated its 70th birthday and the opening of the new Arena building. My task was the development and implementation of a visual branding for a year-long communication campaign around the topic of workplace culture - which pinnacled in a big birthday party on the adidas campus (starring a ferris wheel - evidence here).

In the layout concept, the campaign is honoring the origin and DNA of the company by making the adidas founder the central piece. In the color concept, the past is represented with the Originals blue. It gets juxtaposed with the future: the new building, and yellow as color of the connecting walkways on the new campus. Hand-painted brushstrokes emphasise human creativity.

70 years of adidas - branding, creative direction and employee activation

In 2019, adidas celebrated its 70th birthday and the opening of the new Arena building. My task was the development and implementation of a visual branding for a year-long communication campaign around the topic of workplace culture - which pinnacled in a big birthday party on the adidas campus (starring a ferris wheel - evidence here).

In the layout concept, the campaign is honoring the origin and DNA of the company by making the adidas founder the central piece. In the color concept, the past is represented with the Originals blue. It gets juxtaposed with the future: the new building, and yellow as color of the connecting walkways on the new campus. Hand-painted brushstrokes emphasise human creativity.

For the internal campaign, my goal was to make the campaign about what matters the most, the people in the company. It kicked off with a surprise poster campaign: the adidas campus was decorated with a poster collage of pictures and portraits paired with insider facts of our employees, products, new buildings and brand partners - but only half of the poster spots were filled, the other half stayed empty. Simultaneously, a “portrait collage” tool launched, which I created for employees to design their own #adidas70 visual digitally. Countless of the generated images were shared on the adidas intranet and ultimately projected back into physical space: they got printed and hung up to fill the remaining empty spaces on the poster walls in the adidas offices around the globe. The campaign was a prime example how to engage and empower humans and employees through creativity. It built on the authenticity of the employees and their passion for the company. It fueled an increase of employee pride.

The #adidas70 branding expanded also on external corporate communication channels, amongst others on the adidas company blog where I developed all visuals for a feature story around workplace culture: hand-painted headlines, photography, graphics, sourcing and selection of employee-generated content, special formats (360° click-through gallery), image collages: