As the first 'Hu' campaign for the adidas Originals = Pharrell Williams brand, the collection celebrated the cultural diversity of humanity around the world. Pharrell was passionate about working with Native Americans from North Dakota’s M.H.A Nation to learn about their community and listen to their personal stories and traditions of humanity, compassion, and culture.
“Hu is short for human— human being, human race, human kind, but ‘hue’ itself is also a reference to color. As human beings, we all have a color. We all look different, we all speak different languages, but we’re all connected.” — Pharrell Williams
Involvement: Account Management, Brand Strategy, Production, Copywriting, Integrated Marketing
Objective: We sat down with both Pharrell and adidas to discuss their visions for an integrated advertising campaign and understand their goals to:
-- Create a platform for people to feel empowered, tell their stories, and celebrate the brand’s purpose of equality, acceptance, and co-existence
-- Showcase the product dynamically
-- Develop a brand guideline for subsequent adidas Originals = Pharrell Williams ‘Hu’ campaigns
Solution: As this was the debut of ‘Hu’ our team had to establish a process that would enable us to best represent both Pharrell and adidas’ vision. We developed a balanced narrative and aesthetic that connected people through love, color, and stories by casting locally and pairing imagery with adidas product and traditional Native American POWOW outfits.
The collection featured various flags and translations of the phrase “Human Race”, so we used this to develop the campaign message: ‘I play for the human race.’ Additionally, we created a short documentary to further amplify the authenticity of the MHA community and their residency.
We delivered a campaign that was unique to anything the adidas Originals brand has done before, created a platform for different communities to tell their stories with each subsequent drop of ‘Hu’, and set a visual and tonal guideline for the future of ‘Hu’.