Addidas Left to Right - When art is a marketing tool

Finally, Adidas puts street art in the right use. This project involves street artists from both East and West coast to use giant sneakers as canvas and show them around town. The Brand promoting activity pushes the idea across successfully. They got a lot of recognitions and media coverages. However, at my first glance, this marketing campaign triggered a controversy in my head.

Is this the time that street art becomes a marketing tool?

For a while since street culture has been used in marketing to gather niche and reflect the concept of freedom or rebellion. X-treme games, graffiti art, and street dance competitions are must-hold events for marketers, but not frequent that street artists put their works on a product and endorse the product. This situation might occur when I didn't pay attention. There is nothing wrong with using subculture icon in a mainstream product. Many times, if you use it right, both product and street artists support each other. If you use it incorrectly, there will be serious fire back. I don't really worry about bad campaign hurt product sales, but I do care about a sub-culture losing its secrecy.

Every sub-culture has it life cycle. It is born and root deeper in a society gathering more people to share the same way of doing things. If there are enough people, the sub becomes pop culture or mainstream merging with everyone way of life. If not, it disappears.

Here's the issue. If a sub-culture is tainted by marketing injection, it might not be a pure 'human-shaped' culture but a marketing material.

Are we polluting our way of life just to sale stuff?

Or maybe street culture has never been secrete at all.

Is liberty of underground movement a myth after all?