adidas Originals have been dressing the feet of style icons for decades. In 2022, however, they were losing their lustre and sales were declining.

Our brief was to boost perceptions of the brand as a digital and cultural innovator, using the newly revamped and fluid Ozworld sneaker collection as our hero product.

In short, we needed to recapture Ozworld’s original spirit of unbound discovery.

With the world entering a new era of fearless creative exploration through the metaverse, we had a unique opportunity to win brand cred with the coveted GenZ demographic - gatekeepers for what’s cool in streetwear, gaming, music, art and pop-culture.

Our insight was that Gen-Z, the most fluid generation yet, define themselves online. In fact, one in three say their online identity is their most authentic self.

With bold and fluid identities, Gen-Z felt frustrated by the limitations of the metaverse for self-expression, preventing them from being uniquely themselves.

Our big idea was to unlock fluidity in the metaverse by providing tech solutions and experiences that enabled Gen-Z to be their true selves.

We would create the world’s first personality-based avatar generator. Powered by AI, it enabled users to create their own Ozworld avatars and explore different virtual worlds with one unique identity.

These avatars would act as virtual advertisements for adidas wherever they went and reach into places adidas traditionally couldn’t.

In addition, we’d create immersive Ozworld experiences in the metaverse. Within these, Gen-Z and creators could feature their own avatars, design their own spaces and play.

The content from these experiences would then be broadcast back into the real world, fuelling more excitement around the Ozworld sneaker collection among mainstream streetwear buyers.

We built the world’s first AI generative avatar platform based on users’ personality.

Users were prompted to answer a few simple personality questions, pick their favourite Ozworld silhouette and assemble their unique Avatar.

With 60 colour combinations, 24 materials and 12 different add-ons, we generated 10 million unique avatars.

Through Ready Player.Me, users could take their Ozworld avatar into more than 2,000 different metaverse platforms.

In China, we hosted a virtual Ozworld festival in Tencent’s TMELAND, where people could hang out, dance, play games and flaunt their own avatar on a catwalk.

In the West we built an Ozworld within Fortnite, featuring mini-games, fully customisable and playable worlds that embodied the Ozworld style. Fortnite influencers kicked off the games, livestreamed on Twitch.

Users were also able to enter their avatars into a competition to feature in the campaign, broadcast city-wide across DOOH screens around the world.

Inverting the traditional campaign approach to be metaverse-first drove exceptionally high reach. We hit 642 million impressions and facilitating the new age of originality boosted brand affinity by 11 points.

Our uniquely-you avatar generator created more than 10 million avatars, enabling a new form of fluid self-expression, flooding the web across 2,000 metaverse platforms, dark social and sub-realms.

We populated the virtual space with self-expression driven by adidas.

Users even started selling their own avatars as NFTs (spiking adidas’ NFT price by 162%).

The TMELAND festival was attended by 7.5 million people and the Fortnite mini-games delivered 4.1 million minutes played.

adidas Original’s share of search increased fivefold on Baidu and by 57% on Google.

Purchase intent rose by between nine and 16% in different markets and converted into real sales, with the hero collection smashing sales targets by 94% with an ROI of 303%.