With the FIFA Women’s World Cup taking place in Australia for the first time, adidas has announced its partnership with The Brag Media to support and promote the event in a fresh and interesting way, particularly for audiences outside of the sporting bubble.
Inspired by adidas’ three stripes motif, the brand recruited local artists Mallrat and Kwame to sample the sounds of football from Matildas’ star striker, Caitlin Foord, to create ‘Back Of The Net Beats’.
Foord, who has been playing football since she was nine, took to the field to do some of her training drills. Mallrat then sampled the audio and followed its natural rhythms. From there, she chopped it up, slowed it down, created chords and found moments to partner with her voice.
The process resulted in the creation of a brand new song – ‘Forums’ by Mallrat (feat. Kwame)
The Brag Media studio team then shot, directed and produced an accompanying short film that showcased the authentic connection between sport and music. This culminated in a piece of content that had significant talkability that was amplified across The Brag Media’s broader media cultural network including Rolling Stone Australia, Tone Deaf, Hypebeast, Life Without Andy and The Music Network.
The Brag Media head of production, Brad Arnold, said: “Our speciality is helping brands entrench their message within culture, so the idea with this campaign was to natively weave the message of the WWC into mainstream consciousness.
“We wanted to create a song that performed this role, but also lived as its own artform. Listening to the track on its own, you would not easily know the secret behind the song; where the beat is actually captured football sounds and the lyrics are underlined with football metaphors and references.
“The hero film was then created to connect people with that insight, to tell the story of the project, and the meaning and creation behind the song.”