2011 marked the first year that adidas offered a full complement of supporters’ apparel for the New Zealand teams of the international tri-nation Super Rugby competition. Our job was to amplify the excitement around the competition, leveraging the passionate engagement of the fans to promote the sale of fan wear. Rather than simply creating a traditional catalogue, we created an interactive catalogue containing real ‘Super Obsessed fans’ and the object of their adoration: their favourite players.

With the season only a month old & with four months yet to run we don’t yet have results. But we can speak for the activation that kicked off the campaign with each club having around 6,000 avid fans on facebook to pull their ‘super obsessed’ fans from.We also eDM’d a fanbase of over 100 000 fans, making sure the shoot, and catalogue content was a real success and guaranteed an online audience.

Super Obsessed fans became core to the creation of the online catalogue. Using Facebook pages, PR and an eDM, rugby nuts of all ages were given the opportunity to spend the day with their Super Rugby heroes. We gave them the chance to get their hands on them. You can’t replicate that kind of obsessiveness, so we channeled it instead.We filmed fans wearing the new adidas apparel using a Phantom camera recording the action at 1000 frames per second. ‘Zombieland’ meets Super Rugby.The extreme slow-motion showcased the clothing range, creating a series of interactive experiences on the site.

Catalogues are often static & ‘boring’. Our solution was unique, functional and offered users something with a bit of funk. If ‘user centred design’ is a philosophy, then we put our users ( the fans) at the heart of our story and interactive design.We captured the true energy of a fan-player relationship, resulting in a unique and true web experience that allowed users/fans to interact with the videos of their star players being mobbed, enabling them to explore every moment and every single piece of apparel, in glorious detail.