When adidas' Pocket Coach Facebook campaign got 10 million video ad impressions

Cricket is almost a religion in India. But, almost 73 per cent of India lives in small towns and villages with no access to any cricket training as most coaching centres are located in the metros. With limited access to specialised coaching for the game, people often resort to watching online videos mostly on slow 2G connections and feature phones. To tackle this problem, sportswear brand Adidas recently launched a Facebook campaign titled 'Adidas Pocket Coach. Small towns. Big dreams'.

As part of the campaign, Adidas used Facebook's slideshow feature to create lightweight cricket tutorial videos called Adidas' Pocket Coach, which loads five times faster than regular videos. The cities targetted were Kanpur, Lucknow, Meerut, Agra, Ghaziabad, Allahabad, Mohali, Ajmer, Trichy, Cuttack, and Bathinda, where Adidas made use of seven static slides that auto-played to mimic a 15-second video during which cricket coaching was provided to millions of children across the cities from June 20th to July 1st.

Damyant Singh, senior marketing director, Adidas India, says, "Adidas' aim is to encourage and enable athletes to pursue their passion for sports. The Adidas Pocket Coach Facebook campaign has helped us reach out to young athletes who do not have access to coaches and training videos. The lightweight cricket tutorial has trained thousands of kids in hundreds of small towns across India to help them improve their cricketing skills. Within a very short span, we saw over 2 million posts, reactions, shares, and comments through the video and post promotion on Facebook. We plan to further build on this early momentum by reaching out to more athletes via regional language adaptations and additional training capsules."

Slideshows reduce video production time and use of resources, have smaller file size and take up less data, and help advertisers reach more people with eye-catching video ads regardless of device or connection. There are 148 million monthly active people on Facebook, and as many as 140 million monthly actively people logging in from their mobiles, says the company in a press release. The Facebook campaign was meant to work on 2G connections and feature phones, which work on low bandwidth as compared to the 3G and 4G connections.

Facebook helped Adidas target and segment the target audience on the basis of age, location, device, and bandwidth. So far, the Facebook campaign has clocked 10 million video ad impressions and over one million video views in addition to having reached 1.9 million people until now. The campaign has also had over two million posts, reactions, shares, and comments through the video and post-promotion activities on Facebook.

Not only this, the campaign also saw celebrity endorsements from Indian cricketers, Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, and Unmukt Chand.