Experiential

adidas breaks the internet by airdropping Childish Gambino's kicks.

Overview

Making noise
at Coachella.

Coachella is a notorious cacophony of performances, selfies, installations, and general madness — and yet we went on location to get people’s attention. In anticipation of Childish Gambino’s new adidas shoe line and forthcoming performance, we sent invites to be the first to wear the shoes via AirDrop. What happened next, no one saw coming.

Deliveries

Strategy, Production, Design, UX, Development, & QA

Yes, Donald Glover was giving away sneakers at Coachella.
Donald Glover put a new twist on the old-fashioned sneaker giveaway.
In a world where collab drops lead to site crashes and lines constricting city blocks… this seems like a breath of fresh air.

Approach

This is getting out of hand.

With this system in place, we AirDropped invites to unsuspecting attendees, an ideal demographic consisting of the socially savvy, Childish Gambino fans, and hypeshoe devotees. Those who received the invite could pick up their shoes on-site, throw them on, and immediately start Instagramming them—generating that pre-release hype we were looking for.

Challenges

(Not) sending invites into the ether.

Because we were pinging random people, the challenge was in the follow-up—particularly in seeing how AirDrop invites turned into social currency and/or purchases. That meant staying on top of the social channels and following up with people who bought the shoes on site to measure success.

Features

The power of press.

The stunt generated a lot of press. A lot. Not just the incredible organic reach of the social posts that were posted, but once the press caught on, all bets were off. This was a master class in timing, a perfect blend of a shoe release, a musical performance, a fun bit of tech, opportunity for something exclusive, and thirsty press—that’s how you make noise at Coachella.