The earned-first playbook

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Read time: 4 mins 13 secs

Adidas dropped their "Backyard Legends" ad last week ahead of the World Cup this year. Timothée Chalamet plays a street football recruiter assembling a team against an unbeaten neighbourhood crew. Lionel Messi, David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane and even Bad Bunny feature. The five minute film pulled 56 million Instagram views in four days. This is what the traditional advertising model looks like when everything goes right, and it's not done yet. This is the opening chapter of a campaign Adidas will build across six weeks of World Cup football. They're architecting a narrative that runs through the tournament. Sustained storytelling at a scale most brands can't execute.

This ad is the beginning of a story they'll build on. But three Cannes Lions Grand Prix winners decided to do things the other way around. Each one generated billions of earned impressions before their advertising ran. They created cultural conversation first, then released the advertising as the payoff to a story audiences were already following along with.

Four weeks before CeraVe's 2024 Super Bowl ad aired, a rumour started spreading online. Had actor Michael Cera secretly founded the skincare brand? The evidence was thin, but mounting. Paparazzi photos surfaced. Creators started speculating without confirming.

None of it was real.

CeraVe orchestrated everything carefully enough that 400+ creators joined the speculation organically, without knowing they were participating in a marketing campaign. By the time the Super Bowl ad aired, the speculation had already generated 15.4 billion impressions against a target of 1 billion.

By the time the ad aired, the audience had been waiting for it for weeks.

The conspiracy was debunked to score a point the ad alone couldn't. Celebrity founders had taken over the skincare market. CeraVe's credibility was built on dermatologists. Four weeks of fake founder speculation made that positioning a punchline the audience arrived at themselves.

If you can create something audiences genuinely want resolved, the ad delivers a resolution to a story they chose to follow. The advertising earns attention by completing a story. That's different from demanding attention for one.

CeraVe's audience were tracking a mystery, waiting for it to resolve. DoorDash built something that required active participation.

DoorDash would deliver every product advertised during Super Bowl LVIII to one winner. To enter, viewers had to submit a promo code that could only be assembled by watching every ad in the broadcast. A code that was 1,813 characters long.

This rewired the entire Super Bowl advertising ecosystem. Every other brand's spend became a DoorDash acquisition channel. Every brand paying millions for 30 seconds of Super Bowl airtime was now driving DoorDash sweepstakes entries. The more other brands advertised, the more valuable DoorDash's mechanic became.

The result was 11.9 billion earned impressions and 8 million entries. The scale is impressive. The quality of attention is more interesting. The people entering DoorDash's sweepstakes sat through a full broadcast, assembled a 1,813-character code, and actively submitted it.

The mystery mechanism creates spectators. The participation mechanic creates players who have skin in the game. When DoorDash's campaign resolved and the winner received $500,000 in prizes, the audience was watching along to find out if they won. That's a categorically different kind of engagement than watching an ad.

CeraVe invented a mystery. DoorDash designed a game. Xbox created genuine stakes.

In November 2023, Football Manager 2024 launched with an unusual offer embedded in the game. A genuine full-time job at Bromley FC, an English football club, available only to players who earned it through gameplay. You had to demonstrate the skills inside the game before you could apply for the role outside it.

Nathan Owolabi did exactly that. He went from playing Football Manager in his spare time to working as a professional tactical analyst. Bromley FC's season became his season. Their push for promotion to League Two was real. The outcome was genuinely uncertain. A three-part TNT Sports documentary followed him through it.

The campaign generated 1.5 billion impressions. Football Manager play on Xbox increased 190%. Bromley FC got promoted. But those numbers don't capture what was actually different about the attention this campaign earned. Audiences didn't follow because they were curious how a campaign would resolve, or because they had a shot at a prize. They followed because they cared what happened to a real person.

The idea of turning virtual skill into a real professional career had precedent. Nissan and PlayStation's GT Academy had been finding professional racing drivers through Gran Turismo since 2008. But that was a talent programme. Xbox built a campaign around the same insight, which meant millions of people could follow the story in real time.

A manufactured mystery can be reverse-engineered. Real human stakes require actually building something worth caring about. That's what makes this the hardest mechanism to execute, and the one that produces the most durable brand memory. The emotional investment audiences developed in Nathan's story was built on genuine stakes. That kind of attention doesn't behave like ad recall.

The Adidas campaign will be widely seen. With that cast and that budget, it's difficult to miss. But even with such an objectively strong campaign, the audience watching "Backyard Legends" arrived cold. The ad had to earn their attention from scratch, competing equally with everything else in the feed.

CeraVe, DoorDash, and Xbox took a different approach. Their audiences arrived already bought in. CeraVe's in a mystery. DoorDash's in a game. Xbox's in a person. The advertising was paying off attention that had already been invested.

That shift in sequence changes the fundamental economics of a campaign. Attention built on genuine investment behaves differently from attention captured through a clever hook. People share things they're personally involved in, and they watch to the end. CeraVe hit 15x its impression target because hundreds of millions of people were already looking for the answer to their mystery before the ad existed. The creative quality was incidental.

The mechanism scales well outside the Super Bowl. A product launch with a genuine mystery built into the release. A partnership with real stakes attached. A campaign that makes the audience a participant before it asks them to be a customer.

Adidas's approach over the next six weeks of the World Cup will be worth watching. They're treating the tournament as a narrative arc, and that's genuinely interesting to see from a brand at that scale. But the architecture is still the same. The story lives inside the advertising.

The three other campaigns built a story before the advertising started. By the time each ad ran, the audiences showing up already had skin in the game. That's a completely different model. For brands that can't assemble that cast or sustain that spend, it might be the more replicable one.

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