Summary
Impossible is nothing! So why should Running be!
www.funrun.cn is an endeavor by adidas to drive a 'Running' culture in China
When did the initiative break?
April 1st week 2007
Who is the initiative speaking to?
Age focus: 13-26 years, Male & Female
Running amateurs who are running for enjoyment

Marketing Challenge
Running, jogging and walking are quite popular but considered to be low involvement activities that don’t require a lot of technical skill, therefore proper equipment and footwear are usually neglected.

The market needs to be educated properly with clear yet simple information that could be understood easily in an interesting yet fun manner. Too much technical details just turns-off the consumers.

Strategic Approach
The communication strategy is all about offering online tools to young runner’s which will enable them to take their Impossible Journey towards Running through a step by step approach.

This step by step approach starts with allowing online users to create their profile, draw or write their Personal Impossible Goal, find running partners in their own city, create running routes, mark their calendar for the running event, get weather updates against their running date, navigate through the vast user generated content and even dialogue with others in the community BBS. The whole community is centralized on a map of China where each user’s Personal Impossible Card can be viewed against his/ her city name.

Results:
Within the first month of the launch:
1. The community attracted 514,151 unique visitors and about 6347 visitors per day – reflecting campaign exposure.
2. The return rate of 23.7% was met against the set KPI of 20.3% - reflecting greater involvement with the community tools/ offering.
3. The conversion rate to home page KPI of 32.4% was met against the set KPI of 17%.
By second month:
1. Page views per visit saw an improvement in the second month over first month, indicating how users interest in this community built overtime, how the user generated content drove users to explore more pages per visit.
Page views per visit in first month: 2.53 (which is less than the KPI of 2.95), and page views per visit in second month: 4.28 (which is greater than the KPI of 2.95)

Why does this campaign deserve an award?
This campaign is a true 360 campaign which started with call to participation through offline campus Running events, PR support, print support & Online WOM campaign. This online community reflects the true web 2.0 framework of user generated content wherein runners from across China can come together & network with each other on a common goal. One of the most unique offering of this community is that users can register for various Running related events – either organized by adidas or by users themselves. A platform that indeed makes ‘Running a reality offline, not just online’.