The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2024
adidas turns Stockholm's digital billboards into race checkpoints for runners
For five days adidas turned Stockholm's digital billboards into race checkpoints, with live stats and a leaderboard posted in public.
adidas
What it had to solve
A statistic shaped the brief: 70% of urban runners follow the same routes daily and slowly lose motivation. adidas saw the boredom of the daily loop as an opening — give runners a reason to see their own city as a course and make the brand part of running culture.
How it works
A statistic shaped the brief: 70% of urban runners follow the same routes every day and slowly lose motivation. adidas saw the boredom of the daily loop as an opening — give runners a reason to see their own city as a course.
The Billboard Run turned that insight into media: Stockholm's digital billboards became race checkpoints. To start, a runner triggered a countdown on a billboard and their phone; as they raced, their stats were tracked and shown in real time, and the finish-line billboard displayed times and leaderboards for everyone on the street to see.
By blending billboards, movement and competition, the campaign made running through the city a public, immediate contest instead of a private habit. The result was an open-air race with no boundaries and no fixed route — and a place for adidas inside running culture, now archived in the D&AD awards archive.
Why it lands
- The city's existing screens became the product: no new race infrastructure, just the billboards runners already pass every day.
- Public leaderboards turned a solitary training habit into visible competition, which is what pulls runners off their usual route.
- The phone-and-billboard sync made the start feel real and shared, so the race existed on the street and with the runner at once.
- Because the course was the city, adidas got a place inside running culture rather than a one-off message about it.
What it did
For five days the city itself was the running course: runners competed from billboard to billboard while their results appeared live in public, and the format was archived in the D&AD awards archive.
What you can take
When the medium performs the sport instead of announcing it — a billboard that starts your race, tracks it and posts the leaderboard — the ad becomes the event people want to join.
Since then
The five-day run ended with Stockholm's runners racing between billboards and checking their times in public. The idea lived on as an award-archived case of connected out-of-home, showing that a network of screens can stage an event rather than merely advertise one.
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