Here’s the setup: Adidas states very publicly that they want to own the World Cup – an event that attracts an audience bigger than the Olympics or the Superbowl. They outbid everyone else to become official sponsor. And wary of ambush by their arch-enemy (and one of the great television advertisers of all time) they lock out Nike ads in all 64 televised games. Then they open the mass marketing floodgates: published estimates say Adidas World Cup spending will total well over $200 million. If you’ve watched any of the games, you’ve seen evidence of that spend.
So Nike, shut out of its traditional strength, goes new media – but in the same epic, outrageous, courageous way we’ve watched them do mass media for years. The core of the idea, as always, is brilliantly simple: Joga Bonito – Portugese for “play beautiful”.
They build content around the Brazillian team that not only is among the elite in every World Cup competition but is also incredibly popular world-wide for the grace and sheer joy of their play. They create a broadband TV channel called jogaTV; they release viral videos, including Brazillian ping pong, that get viewed millions of times all over the web; they allow users to upload themselves passing a soccer ball to enthusiastic peers all over the world in a “soccer chain”. And at the core of the campaign is a social media experience, launched in partnership with a little company called Google. Joga.com is Nike’s social media site for football fans, launched about 3 months ago across 140 countries and in 14 languages. Recently it’s soared in popularity, and is now the 961st most popular site in the world, according to Alexa.
In fact, over the past couple of weeks, Joga.com has at times gotten almost twice as many visitors as Adidas.com. Stop and read that last sentence again, slowly.
Here’s the graph (joga.com in blue, adidas.com in red).
By some accounts, Adidas will outspend Nike 2 to 1 during this World Cup. Adidas has played textbook mass marketing domination — buying up exclusive rights to all the traditional channels for distributing media impressions to this audience. Their name is even on the ball. Nike went another direction, building a community around an appreciation for the poetry of the game, paying nothing for sponsorship, and to a large extent, creating it’s own media.
When Steve Rubel wrote about Joga.com in March, he was excited about the possibilities. He said at the time, “there’s a big story here, gang.” He meant Google entering the brand marketing fray. But there’s another big story here. Look, I know it’s early in the game, and business results are the only metrics that really matter – Adidas may yet be redeemed. But if this plays out that Nike outmaneuvered Adidas, the 2006 World Cup will be remembered as the cleanest “old marketing” vs. “new marketing” case study we’ve seen yet.
I’ll give the last word to Trevor Edwards, Nike’s brand chief, via BusinessWeek: “Kids are talking online, connecting online, it’s just a part of their world…. Gone are the days of one big ad, one big shoe.”
Baba Shetty 
Interesting graph on the web site traffic to both sites. Is that web traffic US or Global? If you look at the Google Trends data, http://www.google.com/trends?q=joga.com%2C+adidas.com you see a completely different viewpoint of the campaign. It would appear that the Adidas campaign is outperforming the Joga campaign by a considerable amount, especially in Latin America.
With the Brazil’s impressive play at the Cup, Joga.com should keep going strong. To emphasize how new media has really exploded globally…during the first round games I got a text message at 6:30 am EST from a Dutch friend in Amsterdam. It simply read “NEDERLANDS!” Clearly, the World owns the Cup not Adidas. Nike has the right idea.
David:
Good questions.
Alexa is world-wide traffic. They list, for example, several Chinese language-only sites in their top 100.
Regarding the Google trends data, which I also looked at prior to publishing this post: the data is only available through April of 2006. If you look closely at the Alexa chart, you\\\’ll see that back then Adidas was outperforming Nike. So actually the data sets are consistent and tell the same story.
It will be good to see the Google Trends data when it\\\’s updated for May and especially June.
Baba
I think David is on to something here. Nike may very well end up slamming Adidas in this World Cup campaign, but I think it is going to take a lot more than one Alexa graph (which logically, would seem to be skewed towards a pro-Joga.com result) to prove that point.
it is also interesting to note that the Google Trends for May (http://www.google.com/trends?q=joga.com%2C+adidas.com&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2006) still seems to indicate that Adidas.com is outperforming Joga.com considerably. Notably, the Google Search Trend Data is backed up by data from Yahoo Search Marketing.
What’s more, no matter how the numbers finally turn out, I still have a hard time seeing this being a coup for Nike: yeah, the Brazilian Ping Pong video is nice, but it has been around for months prior to the World Cup, and any association between the video, Nike, and the World Cup is weak to put it kindly.
Taken as a whole, the Nike campaign is nice, but outside of perhaps execution, I haven’t seen much to suggest that it is markedly better than Adidas’s “Jose+10″ campaign, which at least in my mind seems fresher, hipper, and more engaging.
My guess is Joga.com might outperform Adidas in some of the less “soccer-fluent” regions of the world, but Adidas ends up eating Nike’s lunch everywhere else.
Addidas has without a doubt spent far more money on their advertising campaign than Nike. However, when reading your blog, it appears as if NIke has solely used the internet and different types of new media for their campaign, and that just isn’t the case. I dont know if you have seen them, but there are a number of Joga Bonita TV commercials hosted by former French National and Man United star Eric Cantona that feature such soccer greats as Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry, and Wayne Rooney. These commercials were by no means cheap, and simply because they are not being shown during actual World Cup games does not undermine the effectiveness of the campaign. So although Nike has not spent nearly as much as Adidas, they still have spent quite a bit of money on their traditional TV campaign.
Good point Yoni. There was a mix on both sides. Adidas also had interactive elements as well. Thanks for the comment.
As you mentioned, the business metrics are the only ones that matter, and adidas was redeemed (full disclosure — I work for a unit of adidas).
adidas Sees 24% Boost in Profit
I think the interesting point to me is that Nike has been such a good marketer for such a long time that the a lot of people instantly look at whatever they are doing as something groundbreaking and amazing, whether it really is or not.
“So Nike, shut out of its traditional strength, goes new media – but in the same epic, outrageous, courageous way we’ve watched them do mass media for years.”
“Epic?” “Courageous?” Again, I am completely biased, but yeesh — that’s some over the top worshipping at the altar of the swoosh…
Just wondering what you think to John Hagel’s article
http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2006/04/jogacom_and_the.html#comment-60185638
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title World Cup Update: Nike slams Adidas. Thanks for informative article
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I went to joga.com and there is just a “coming soon” sign. I wonder if Nike will do anything with this for the 2010 world cup?
If not, the nike soccer store has a lot of cool info already it seems like – lets hope there is more to come from them