ADIDAS Creator Performance Programme

The challenge

Sport culture moves fast — generic influencer lists couldn't keep pace with product drops

ADIDAS needed creator content that felt native to running and street culture — not transactional posts bolted onto campaigns after media was booked.

Internal teams lacked a repeatable vetting standard: audience quality, brand safety, content velocity and willingness to whitelist were inconsistent across markets.

Without a shared scorecard, partnerships and performance argued over talent fees while underperforming creators stayed on roster too long.

One-off creator posts with no path to paid scale or landing clarity
Rising talent costs without attributable reach or engagement lift
Fragmented usage rights delaying whitelisting and test windows

The objective

Vet, partner and scale creators who authentically drive reach and engagement

Build a creator performance programme that vets and partners the right creators for maximum reach and engagement — tied to product stories and campaign windows.

Deliver a roster, briefing system and paid-ready asset library performance teams could scale within days of organic posts going live.

The solution

Roster architecture, briefing, rights and paid amplification in one operating model

DZIR designed a tiered creator matrix by culture territory (running, training, street style) and funnel role — awareness, consideration, conversion.

Vetting combined audience authenticity checks, engagement quality, historical brand fit and legal readiness for paid amplification.

Two-week sprints covered brief, production, rights clearance, trafficking and kill/scale rules on whitelisted Meta and TikTok cells.

Step 1: Creator vetting and tiering framework

Scorecard weighted audience quality, engagement consistency, content craft and category credibility — de-emphasising raw follower counts.

Tier 1 heroes, Tier 2 culture editors and Tier 3 UGC volume creators each had distinct KPIs, fee bands and deliverable counts.

Step 2: Briefing, production and brand safety

Brief templates enforced product visibility, movement authenticity and single primary CTA — with mandatory disclosure and music rights checks.

Batch production days supplemented always-on creator capture around drops and events.

Step 3: Whitelisting, testing and scale rules

Usage-rights packs enabled trafficking within 24–48 hours of organic publish; naming tied asset IDs to creators and offers for clean readouts.

Weekly tests pre-registered reach, engagement rate and CPA/ROAS proxies; underperformers cut, winners received incremental budget and retargeting.

Step 4: Reporting and roster refresh

Dashboard joined creator ID, spend, engagement and commerce proxies so leadership could compare creator units to brand creative fairly.

Quarterly roster refresh retired fatigued talent and introduced tested newcomers without resetting the whole programme.

Business impact

Higher engagement, efficient reach and a creator engine teams could rerun each season

+214%

Engagement rate on creator-led assets vs brand-only benchmarks

4.6×

Reach efficiency on top-quartile creator whitelisting cells

62

Creators vetted; 28 activated for always-on and burst windows

Engagement and reach efficiency improved materially

Creator-led assets delivered more than double the engagement rate of brand-only benchmarks in prospecting and community segments.

Top-quartile whitelisted cells achieved substantially better reach efficiency — more qualified views per pound spent.

Partnerships and performance aligned on one backlog

Shared scorecard ended budget debates driven by relationships alone; spend followed proven engagement and conversion signal.

62 creators vetted and 28 activated gave the brand depth for bursts and always-on without last-minute casting scrambles.

Reusable creator engine for seasonal drops

Playbooks, briefs and rights templates carried forward — reducing time-to-market for the next franchise launch.

UGC and hero assets fed retail, e-commerce and paid with consistent narrative thread.

* Programme results vary by sector, offer and market conditions. Metrics reflect client-approved reporting periods.

ADIDAS — creator performance marketing for sport and culture