The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2024
Adidas relaunched a 1972 Munich Olympics shoe without checking what 1972 means
Adidas brought back the SL 72 and built a campaign around it. Nobody in the approval chain asked what those Games are remembered for. It was pulled in days.
Adidas · 2024-07-19
What happened
In July 2024 Adidas relaunched the SL 72, a lightweight running shoe first made for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, and built a campaign around the reissue. Those Games are remembered for the killing of eleven Israeli athletes and a German police officer — a fact available to anyone who looked up the shoe’s own origin.
Nobody in the approval chain looked. The campaign went out, the connection was made publicly within hours, and criticism arrived from several directions at once. Adidas withdrew it within days.
The company apologised publicly and apologised directly to the model it had cast, who said she had not known what the shoe was tied to. Adidas pulled the campaign from every platform and reshot the promotional material.
It was the second brand failure in two years. Adidas was still absorbing the end of the Yeezy partnership in 2022, which left €1.2 billion of unsellable inventory and a €500 million operating loss in 2023 — and had not, in the interval, built the review step that would have caught this one.
Why it happened
- The product carried the history. An anniversary reissue is a reference to a specific year, and nobody checked what that year is known for before building a campaign on it
- There was no step in the approval chain that asks what a reference means to the people who remember it — only whether the creative works
- The people cast in the campaign were given a product without its history, and found out what it was alongside everyone else
- Two years after the Yeezy split cost it €1.2 billion of inventory, Adidas had added no vetting step, so the second failure ran through the same gap as the first
The lesson
A reissue is a reference to the year it comes from, and that year is not yours to choose. Adidas rebuilt a 1972 shoe and never asked what 1972 is remembered for.
Sources
- Adidas apologizes for ad campaign linked to 1972 Munich Olympics — CNN, July 2024
- Adidas apologizes for Bella Hadid campaign linked to 1972 Munich Olympics — CBS News, July 2024
- Adidas — Wikipedia (SL 72 sneaker advertising campaign)
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