ADIDAS SWIM
This one was personal. For adidas, I typically worked on very testosterone fueled sports like handball and football (that's soccer in the U.S.). For once I could draw on my own experiences in concepting for this campaign. While I won't even pretend to know what it's like for women in water sports in the Middle East, I am a woman who loves being in the sea but absolutely loathes trying on swimwear. It was refreshing to work on a campaign aimed at helping women feel comfortable about themselves in the water—a place where despite many (many!) unfortunate swimwear choices, I've always felt right at home.
ADIDAS TENNIS
THE SCOOP & THE SCANDAL:
Out of the blue I got one of those "Is this a prank?" kind of phone calls asking if I would like to work on the adidas account, specifically for a series of television commercials for the upcoming French Open. Umm, YES, please. The resulting scripts were transformed into ads that ran during the Grand Slams, including one for the U.S. Open featuring a big-at-the-time actor who wanted to lend his voice to our ads. We should have known something was horribly wrong when he, in a highly suspicious act of foreshadowing (or was it?), kept changing the tagline from "SMASH THE SILENCE" to "BREAK THE SILENCE" on every read-through. Yikes. The upside was this collaboration turned into an ongoing, nearly decade-long relationship working with adidas' agency of record.