How RUN DMC revolutionised Influencer Marketing
I’m inspired by great leaders. People who see the future and take it upon themselves to carve it out. I’ve recently been watching The Men Who Built America on Amazon Prime which takes you through the 30 year period where industrial magnates such as Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, J.P Morgan and Henry Ford completely revolutionised America and the world as we know it through a series of groundbreaking innovations. Putting aside some questionable ethics, it’s impossible not to be in awe of what these men achieved, but there’s an air of unrelatability. As an entrepreneur you see both problems and opportunity based on the lens through which you view life. As a black man, your scope of problems is probably quite different, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I want to share a story that inspired me and added a new dimension of opportunity to thinking.
In 1986, Russell Simons (business mogul and music manager at the time) made an audacious play that would forever change the relationship that hip-hop culture had with consumer brands. He convinced a team of Adidas Execs to fly over from Germany to attend RUN DMC’s sold out show in Madison Square Gardens. You have to imagine back in ’86, a rap concert populated predominantly by black people, was super off-brand for a company like Adidas. For further context, the company was experiencing international success with elite athletes and football fans but were facing extincintion in the American market where the Aerobics craze had catapulted Reeboks trajectory and Nike had just made arguably their greatest signing and created Jordans. The two giants controlled about 50% of the North American footwear market while Adidas lagged behind at 3%. You need a play that’s completely out of the ordinary to make up that amount of lost market share and that’s why I assume Adidas were willing to send Angelo Anastasio, their Head of Marketing, alongside other heavyweight executives, to see what Russell had to share.
There’s certain trainers that we know will never ever go out of fashion for too long. The icy white, shell-toed Adidas Superstars sit very high on that list. Russell threw an idea at the group to make a song telling a story about their shoes as a metaphor for how far they’d travelled. Coming from basically nowhere and travelling along a path that would lead them the greatest stages in the world. The song was aptly titled “My Adidas”. The crowd reaction at previous venues had been ecstatic when they performed the song, and so they expected it to be the same at the great Madison Square Gardens, but even a visionary like Russell could only have dreamed of the reaction that followed. As the rappers dived into the song, the 20,000 crowd backed them wholeheartedly. Enthused by their reaction, Run reached down to take off his shoe and held it above his head for all to see — and the crowd responded by doing the same. The Adidas Execs looked down upon a sea of three-striped white leather Adidas Superstars waved above the heads of everyone at the garden.
I can only imagine what was going through the minds of the Adidas Execs as they cogs began turning in their brains as the possibility of leveraging this new form of entertainment into a monster marketing machine. That night was nothing short of a cultural revelation. In a move that was the first of its kind, the group became the first ever non-athletes to receive an endorsement deal for an athletic shoe. They went on to launch their own range of signature products and accessories. It transformed the fortunes of Adidas in America who had gone from the brink of irrelevance to being tapped in to the energy of the culture — supercharging its revenue as a result. In Steve Stoute’s words, the deal marked “a convergence between two entities from totally dissimilar, distinct cultural galaxies…presenting new opportunities in the cosmos of corporate marketing.
In 2021, partnerships between brands and prominent black musicians/influencers are common place. No one bats an eyelid when we see Beyonce draped in the three-striped denim of IVY PARK, Kanye pushing his revolutionary YEEZY product lines and closer to home, Stormzy kitted out in his own Adidas fit. Adidas, like many brands have leveraged the culture to stay at the heart of relevancy and aligned themselves in a manner that feels authentic. My intention with this blog was to pay homage to the brilliant minds that laid the blueprint, but also to touch on a phenomenon that changed the lens through which I view entrepreneurship and the future of the black community both locally and culturally. Stoute coined the term “tanning” to describe the effect of hip-hop music as catalytic force that blurred cultural and demographic lines.
In the UK, where only 3% of the population is black, the magnitude of the cultural tremors generated by the culture is scary. If the concept of “tanning” was ever in doubt, what we’ve seen especially in the last five years in the UK has put it well beyond dispute. Rap and Drill dominate the charts and you only have to look at a Wireless or Reading festival clip to conclude that the listenership of these artists are predominantly white. Music has always been the bridge that invites other audiences to share in our story, but the impact travels well beyond that into fashion, speech, even social media trends. Our culture is inarguably one of our most valuable commodities to export to the world and given the growing ties between between native Africans and the diaspora — there’s a wave of opportunity on the horizon for us to really leverage the potency of our culture and export it to create economic opportunity. The question to answer is how do you maximise ownership and share the benefits amongst the collective, not just a few? I don’t have the answers otherwise I’d be a millionaire already. But I do have some ideas, which i’ll share in another post soon.
Thanks for reading.
