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Catalogues 2.0: TBWA\Tequila brings Super Rugby sales to life with interactive trickery

Last year, TBWA’s executive creative director Andy Blood predicted the future of the industry and, in something of a mission statement for the agency following the loss of ASB, said it was all about bringing the creative ideas of the advertising world closer to the utility now offered by digital technology. Well, that’s what TBWATequila has done with a cool new interactive video catalogue for adidas’ Super Rugby merchandise.

2011 marks the first year that adidas has offered a full compliment of Super Rugby supporters’ apparel and the agency, which has been working with adidas since 1999, to come up with an innovative way to highlight the new range, but also get fans excited.

Rather than replicating the traditional real-world catalogue with a boring online version, the new range has been showcased using a mix of video and flash animation to create a series of interactive videos on the adidas Super Obsessed website.

“Bringing a catalogue to life is always an interesting creative challenge, and here we had a large and diverse range of fantastic adidas gear to work with, as well as a great platform with Super Rugby,” says TEQUILA’s creative director Ross Howard. “We realised that showcasing the gear in the moments of fans’ excitement would be a great opportunity, so we just had to figure out a way of capturing all the energy and excitement in an experience that still allowed users to explore and interact with the merchandise.”

While it’s a very well-executed, good-lookin’ site and users can certainly have some fun with the range, the whole reason for the site is presumably to get people to buy the products, so it was particularly surprising to find that its e-commerce functions are non-existent. If you are interested in a product, it points you to a physical store, which seems rather antiquated in these digital times, or redirects you to adidas’ allblacksshop.com, where you need to search for the product again. Also, at this stage you can’t buy items from the new season range there yet. It seems unnecessarily complicated, so there’s still a bit of work to do on that utility.

As for the videos, fans from around New Zealand were chosen using social networks and given the opportunity to spend the day with their heroes from each franchise. They were then filmed wearing the new merchandise and putting in a few big hits on the boys.

The videos were shot at 1000 frames per second using a Phantom HD camera and then encoded into a time-flexible flash site, which allows website users to interact with the super slow motion videos and explore each piece of Super Rugby apparel on the ‘hotspots’ to find out more and drive them to their local adidas store.

Credits

Executive Creative Director – Andy Blood

Creative Director – Ross Howard

Creatives – Jessica Neale, Devendra Girdhar and Matt Watts

Group Account Director – Aaron Taylor

Account Director – Sam Macaulay

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