adidas — APAC performance

Situation & Strategy

I took over the team running the adidas Pacific account with a mandate to change how digital campaigns performed, not to tune them. Shopping ran as one consolidated campaign, which meant budget followed popularity: the products that sold most, rather than the products that earned most.

Tactics

adidas had no infrastructure for telling those apart, so I built it. A custom script ran weekly against the Google Merchant Center feed and scored every product on return on ad spend, return on investment, average order value, and where the data existed, lifetime value.

Action

That scoring split one massive Shopping campaign into sub-campaigns banded by return. Now budget followed margin instead of volume. The new structure revealed a surprise: some of the highest-returning products were the oldest in the catalogue, and a few were under $100. The resulting efficiency funded our expansion into mid- and upper-funnel channels like Demand Gen, which lifted overall performance.

As Global Test-and-Learn lead for AUNZ, we became the first market in the world to roll out Google Demand Gen and Enhanced Conversion Tracking. Going first is uncomfortable. There is no playbook to inherit. But it means you write the playbook for everyone else, and the learning compounds immediately.

Results

adidas Pacific became the most profitable market in APAC for digital marketing campaigns, and Shopping ROAS increased 120 percent year on year. I was asked to help other APAC markets implement the same approach, though I never saw their final results.