MAM
Adidas releases its largest global integrated ad campaign
MUMBAI: Adidas has announced the launch of its latest football advertising campaign ‘Impossible Field,’ which is its largest global integrated advertising campaign.
The campaign brings together six international football stars – David Beckham, Michael Ballack, Raúl, Jermaine Defoe, Kaká and Javier Saviola to capture the essence of ‘Impossible is Nothing.’
The campaign centers on a 60-second commercial in which the players take on an army of opponents all intent on owning the ball. With a mix of precision, balance and power the Adidas team perform on the raised lines of a football pitch.
Unable to run on anything other than the white lines, the players are forced to push their skills to the limit, using tricks and moves unlikely to be seen on a regular pitch.
The players’ skill and ingenuity send opposition players stumbling and falling into the void below. This portrays the superior level of football that is inherent to these players. Whilst still being true to football, it is also taking the game to another level. The raised playing field provides a unique perspective on the game of football, creating a 360 degree experience of the players in action along the pitch lines.
“The Impossible Field campaign reinstates Adidas’ belief in ‘Impossible is Nothing.’ The campaign clearly takes football to the next level. With the most talented team of Adidas football players, it delivers an unbeatable combination of attitude and skillfulness – being played on an impossible pitch,” says Adidas India Marketing Pvt. Ltd managing director Andreas Gellner.
Created by the international agency – 180, the commercial contains nearly 100 shots that took place over a period of seven days in a large studio in Madrid.
Adidas brand ambassador David Beckham says, “In this commercial we’re taking football to a different level. The field has been raised and we play on an elevated field. We have to do so without falling, and of course we have to keep the ball all the time. During the shoot you can’t help but wonder how the commercial is going to look in the end. But after seeing the final version, all I can say is that it’s just amazing to see how it all came together.”
Adidas India has also put in place an integrated communication approach to support the launch of Impossible Field. The campaign will include television commercial, cinema and outdoors in addition to retail marketing. Adidas has also launched a dedicated microsite on Impossible Field.
AD Agencies
Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
