adidas leaks its 2022 World Cup kits by hiding them in Gen Z's cultural hotspots

Before the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, adidas needed to launch the official kits it made for seven national teams and convert that into hype, search interest and shirt sales. The audience it most needed was Gen Z, a group TBWA\London's strategy work found did not respond to the industry's classic superstar kit reveals: they saw themselves as 'Gen Z first, national identity second', and followed the cultures they built rather than rules handed down by older generations.

So the agency decided to leak, not launch. adidas' official 2022 kits were hidden in plain sight inside the places where each market's young football culture actually lives: specially commissioned pages of the hit manga Blue Lock and Giant Killing in Japan, the wall of the Argentina national team's favourite barbershop, a chef at a famous taqueria in Mexico, the main stage at Tomorrowland in Belgium, FIFA22 Twitch face-offs in Spain and TikTok clips in Germany. The reveals acted as the unofficial launch — the first time the new designs were seen in public.

For two months adidas stayed silent while speculation raged across social media, letting fans own the discovery. The campaign then closed with a reveal film that brought all seven markets' drops together, with high-level regional influencers and Spanish internationals Pedri and Ferran Torres exchanging messages about how the kits had appeared under their noses.

The measured results were strong without a paid media push: 6.13 million impressions, more than 347,000 social reactions, a 13% rise in adidas search volume that reached 1.7 times Nike's, and 7.6 times more social mentions than Nike — despite adidas having only half as many teams in the tournament. The work later collected two Sport Grand Clios at the 2023 Clio Sports Awards, and became a reference for how to reinvent the kit drop.