The COPA brand and boot has a decades-long history of offering superior touch, but modern boots have become a fashion statement, favoring style over substance. Adidas wanted to launch their new COPA 19 boot with a focus on its touch-enhancing qualities, but needed to make this core benefit not just relevant again, but understood and valued. In a crowded field of style-focused competitors, we needed to move the conversation past how a boot looks to how it feels.

Modern football boot launches almost always champion the flashy new look of the boot through equally flashy visuals. We wanted to re-frame the focus of a boot launch around the feature that separates COPA from its competition — how they feel — in a way that was just as novel as the message we were sharing. Introducing Area 19, an interactive test facility where participants were cast into darkness and forced to feel their way through each of the COPA 19’s innovative features.

Modern football boot launches almost always champion the flashy new look of the boot through equally flashy visuals. We wanted to re-frame the focus of a boot launch around the feature that separates COPA from its competition — how they feel — in a way that was just as novel as the message we were sharing. Introducing Area 19, an interactive test facility where participants were cast into darkness and forced to feel their way through each of the COPA 19’s innovative features.

Area 19 was teased by a blacked out version of the COPA 19 worn by Juventus star Paulo Dybala during a Championship League match setting the football world ablaze with speculation. Soon after, football writers and influencers flocked to the Area 19, an interactive test facility where they were cast into darkness and forced to feel their way through each of theCOPA 19’s innovative features in a series of sectors. In the first sector they experienced the superior softness of COPA 19’s new K-Leather. In the second sector they crossed through a ball pit created from COPA 19’s new Soft Pod technology. Next, participants walked through a rain room that used real-time sensors to protect them from torrential rain, mimicking the water resistance of COPA’s Fusion skin. In the final sector they saw the product innovations come together in a completed COPA 19 boot, and tried it on for themselves.

Area 19 propelled the COPA 19 to 123+ million earned media impressions and selling out onadidas.com, cementing this modern take on a classic boot in the hearts and minds of footballers

everywhere.