Vertical Football

Why it works

In late summer 2003, TBWA\Japan turned an adidas billboard in Tokyo into a football pitch stood on its end. Two real players, suspended on ropes some 12 storeys above the street, went head to head on the face of the board while crowds gathered below; a second board ran in Osaka. It is studied as the moment a billboard stopped being a picture and became a live event: the poster site itself was the stunt, and the spectacle drew an audience no static image could. It won the Grand Clio for Innovative Media and two One Show Gold Pencils in 2004, one in outdoor and one in innovative marketing, as the One Show named adidas its client of the year. The idea also proved repeatable: in spring 2004 the agency staged a ten-day sequel in Tokyo's Shibuya district, with a bungee-suspended player dunking a basketball on a vertical court.