Why Adidas is Saying Bye Bye to IAAF
The news may have come as a shock to millions of soccer fans and industry experts across the globe that Adidas is set to terminate its sponsorship contract with IAAF four years earlier. It's obvious that their decision to partway from IAAF sponsorship illustrates the growing influence of personalized marketing strategies through social media channels. The growing popularity of celebrity athletes promoting themselves, their teams and their brands through social media has really limited the importance of brand presence at event platforms. Thus making Addidas's sponsorship dissovlment and easy transition for the brand.
Investment Rerouted For Social Media Marketing
The growing popularity of digital means has limited the importance of brand presence at event platforms because the consumers do not interact much with governing bodies; instead, they are influenced with the posts from their celebrity athlete or team players. This is why after almost 11 years of sponsorship Addidas has backed out and can now allot more of its funds to invest in actual players with high fan ranking and extreme online interaction. It's the easiest way to perfect your user engagement by getting feedback from the users directly. Brands are now witnessing the success behind using sports celebrities as promotional tools to collect data and further their insight on potential buyers. This is why brands like Adidas are now investing more and more money in brand promotion through retail outlets, local grassroots events and social media marketing than sponsoring actual events.
Evolution of Sports Marketing Powered By Social Media
It's important to Understand the evolution of digital marketing and the impact of it on sports marketing. It is because of this ever growing influence of social media in everyone’s life that brands are now convinced to focus their advertising investments on buyer centric marketing. In the past, brands could buy a vast amount of commercial airtime and bombard viewers with their ads and this formula would work. It was not a popularity contest, it was a simple equation of whoever had the most money bought the most ads and consequently, they won. But as things started to progress in world of social media it then started to become more than obvious that consumers are watching less television and their access to viewing options had expanded thus changing the direction of sports marketing forcing marketers to start focusing more on finding ways to engage users directly and online through social media channels. And the proof is in the pudding! While it took years of decreased returns and dropped sales for experts to realize that with this new change in the current sports landscape it was now pointless paying for a brand's logo to show up alongside a sports team. Buying vast amounts of ads on television and/or in stadiums did not result in the reach they once had. The modern consumer is more influenced by the personal recommendations of their favorite celebrity athlete than a brand's presence at an actual event. The co-sign from a celebrity anthete on a social media platform can and will easily generate more sales for the brand than their traditional forms of advertising. ...and this is why Adidas is saying Bye Bye to IAAF.
