Yup. Back in 7 days. See you then, hopefully.
This entry was written by , posted on August 18, 2007 at 3:17 am, filed under Break. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
So this isn’t another post about a new and fancy campaign of our beloved sportsbrand with the three stripes. No, this is the story about a relationship lasting over 50 years. Wonderful years of mutual success. Times of neverending pioneer work. It’s the history of adidas (or to be more precise of Adi Dassler) and the German national football team. Adi and his abiding love for sports on the one side and a great football nation on the other side. Here a man that developed state of the art sports equipment to make sportsmen even better. And there a team winning the world cup three times and rocketing the sales of adidas products in the sky.
This relationship is special. Because both are German success stories for the most parts of their history. Like back in 1954 when Helmut Rahn plus 10 beat the vastly superior Hungarian team in the finals of Bern.
And with the success of one partner the other got successful and more successful as well. Who doesn’t remember the team of 1974 with football heroes like Franz “the Kaiser” Beckenbauer or Gerd “Bomber of the nation” Müller and their spectacular final match against the (again) superior Dutch football team with the likes of Cruyff and Neeskens.
But times got harder for both. Adidas not only had to face the family’s own competitor Puma, that was founded by Adi’s elder brother Rudolf (a quite interesting story, because the rivalry between the two brothers who both founded their company in Herzogenaurach actually did split the whole town into one adidas camp and a Puma camp). No, adidas had to struggle with the upcoming competitor from Oregon. NIKE. And just as their suporter the German team wasn’t the best anymore. So it was quite a surprise when in 1990 a team around Lothar Matthäus, Jürgen Klinsmann and Rudi Völler beat the (again) superior Agentinian crowd led by the “Hand of God”, Diego Maradonna.
The last gold age for the German national football team. Because since then the mutual success is gone. Though adidas is still number two, they are unbelievable successful. Only our team has gone through dark times. World cup 1994 and 1998 were horrible. Short highs like in 1996 with the European Championship and 2002 with the second place in the world cup were followed by disastrous competitions in the following years. The only absolute term was the partnership with adidas. But as the team wasn’t that successful they were supported with “only” 11 millions Euro per year what is, compared to the French national team, a small amount. But then in 2006 young German football players like Bastian Schweinsteiger, Lukas Podolski and Miroslav Klose under the leadership of Jürgen Klinsmann achieved the impossible. Thanks to Teamgeist and 80 million people standing behind them like a wall they beat vastly superior teams like Agentinia and Portugal and made the 3rd place in the world cup 2006 in Germany. Germany adored this team. And until now they are playing the best and most successful football throughout Europe. Great for adidas, isn’t it?
No. And now after a long story we arrive at the purpose of this post. NIKE wants the German team to wear their logo from 2011. And the offer the unbelievable amount of 500 millions Euro for 8 years (that’s over 5 times more than adidas pays right now). Immediately adidas made an offer of 22 million. But the Nike offer is still the double. So what to do?
Forget about a relationship lasting more than 50 years? Or reject an offer that would help to strengthen the youth work in German football? History or Future? Today representatives of adidas and the German football association met in a hotel to talk about the topic. It’s a small headline in the news but it’s a question worth talking about. So what do you think?
This entry was written by , posted on August 16, 2007 at 11:59 am, filed under Brands. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Today our agency received an offer from a company called dynetic. It was immediately send to everybody in the agency to see if they would be interested to meet them. So, what can I say. It’s alluring, isn’t it?
“… dynetic is the technological leading soaftware specialist for mobile content-transcoding, -adaption, -rendering und -delivery – and that world wide. Our solutions enable you to provide any kind of content and websites of your clients to more than 4.800 mobile end devices easily and efficient while using optimized standards. Optional we offer you to access our whole range of attendance of dynetic for development and operation of mobile services. We made international top brands – from a variety of sectors – like eBay, AOL, Spiegel, freenet, ADAC, kicker, Maggi or RTL mobile thanks to our mobile-technology emoveo UAP. It potentiates the optimized delivery of content such as text, picture, website content, video streams or audio podcasts to mobile end devices as well as the provision of messaging services (SMS/MMS) or java clients. Now together with you, agency, we want to make more top brands mobile…”
This entry was written by , posted on at 10:34 am, filed under Think. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
After some time I have realized that my blog still hasn’t learn to write his own posts and isn’t able to live on it’s own yet. Stupid little thingy. That’s why after nearly one month of doing nothing else than working, looking for a room and saying “Goodbye” to lovely clients and real people I am back to take over my blog again. This post is basically here to just inform you about that. Nothing more, nothing less. And if you have some time and are around Hamburg, why not pop by the farewell party of our lovely account manager Merle, who is going to the UK for love, and me? Everybody is welcome. Well, at least everybody with tolerable manners and body perspiration. Cheers, would be lovely to see you.
This entry was written by , posted on at 8:47 am, filed under Break. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
This is a post from a blog I did, called “This is getting scary”.
I am sorry. Haven’t been around on this blog for a while, though it’s mine. But exciting things happened over the last months or so. To make a long story short: From the beginning of September I will start as a WKsider at Wieden+Kennedy in London. It’s great and I’m excited as hell. It did cost a lot of money to fly to interview and a lot of work on another blog, but it was worth every goddamn penny and second. So the last thing I can say to anyone who might read this: If you have a thing you really, really want to become real, then go for it. With all your heart, blood, sweat and tears. Don’t be afraid to fail. You might get hurt, your might bite the dust mouth open wide, you might fall on your butt…but in the end it may be worth it. And if not, at least you have tried and learned a thing or two. Or as the lovely people at WK put it in one of their presentation-slides:
What’s left to say is a hand full of huge thanks. To some people who supported me a lot. You know who you are. Furthermore I have two big and special thank you. The first one is for my lovely girlfriend. Because she kept the dream alive, though it means that our love will be a distance one for quite some time. And the second one is for Marcus who had more than one ear for my questions, kicked my ass when I needed it, helped with his musical genius and his brilliant critic.
Now thanks for your interest and if you would like to be updated about what I am doing and what it’s like at Wieden+Kennedy, I will be happy to see you again on my main blog: “I am Seb”.
This entry was written by , posted on August 10, 2007 at 4:24 pm, filed under Wieden+Kennedy. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.