Adidas' 'Pocket cricket Coach' on Facebook

The latest tool from Facebook – Slideshow -- helps advertisers create videos that use less data and can be consumed in lower bandwidths or in emerging markets with 2G connections

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Mumbai | August 8, 2016

Facebook has always been innovative when it comes to giving access of its services to global users, be it someone from a developed country or someone from an emerging country who uses 'Facebook Lite', a lighter version of the social networking site.

It has been constantly innovating and using technology, be it their auto-play videos tool or its native ads or to the latest feature of slideshow videos.

In an attempt to connect the world, Facebook has developed 'Slideshow', a tool that makes the creation of video ads easier and is possible to watch on every device and with any connection speed. The lightweight video ad is created from a series of still images. Slideshow is easy for advertisers to use and engaging for people.

The tool reduces the need for video production time and resources, has a smaller file size and takes up lesser data, which helps advertisers reach out to more people with eye-catching video ads regardless of device or connection.

Adidas has launched its new slideshow campaign in India, called 'Adidas Pocket Coach. Small towns. Big dreams'. Almost 73 per cent of India lives in small towns and villages with no access to any cricket training. Most of the coaching centres are located in all big towns and opportunities are limited. There are plenty of coaching videos online, but on a 2G connection they are slow to load. Four in every five phones in India are feature phones.

The aim of the campaign is to reach out to young talent and next generation players across all small towns in India, which otherwise would not have been possible through traditional modes of advertising.

Almost every young child in India is passionate about cricket. But multiple cricket academies are located only in few big cites of the country. Most Indians live in small towns with no access to such training and limited data connectivity on their feature phones.

Adidas used seven static slides that auto-played to mimic a 15-second video, giving cricket coaching to millions of kids in several towns across the country every day. A 'made for mobile' idea, the Adidas Pocket Coach campaign was designed specially to work on 2G connections and feature phones, giving many young people access to coaching capsules even on low bandwidth. It used Facebook's targeting capabilities of segmenting the audience by age, location, device and bandwidth to serve these slideshows in cities outside the main metros and used sequencing to serve them in the right order and frequency.

In a short span of 11 days, Facebook helped Adidas reach the right people. It had 10 million video ad impressions, over 1 million video views and had reached 1.9 million people. The campaign saw over two million posts, reactions, shares, and comments through the video and after promotion on Facebook.

Damyant Singh

Damyant Singh, Senior Marketing Director, Adidas India, said, “As the authentic sports brand, Adidas' aim is to encourage and enable athletes in pursuing their passion for sports. The Adidas Pocket Coach Facebook campaign has helped us in reaching out to young athletes who do not have access to coaches and training videos. The lightweight cricket tutorial trained thousands of kids in hundreds of small towns across India, helping them improve their cricketing skills. Within a very short span, we saw over two million posts, reactions, shares, and comments through the video and post promotion on Facebook.”

He further added, “We plan to further build on this early momentum by continuing to invest in reaching out to even more athletes via regional language adaptations and incorporating additional training capsules.”

Cricketers like Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Unmukt Chand have endorsed the campaign across their social media showing support for this initiative.

Internationally, Coca-Cola in Kenya and Nigeria ran a video ad to raise awareness about the new season of their show, Coke Studio Africa. To extend the reach of their ad to people within their target audience who were on slow connections or features phones, they took high-resolution screenshots from the video, uploaded them in sequence along with some basic text and ran the story as a slideshow on Facebook. And the results were encouraging: they reached two million people — twice their goal — and raised ad awareness by 10 points in Kenya.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

Info@BestMediaInfo.com