Let’s take a look.

A new magazine

Firstly, you can see exactly what the editorial style of this digital magazine is by the LinkedIn post announcing the arrival of GamePlan A.

It’s motivational and focused on sport as part of a work-life balance.

The fact that the magazine posts to LinkedIn at all is worthy of note.

gameplan a

The venture isn’t entirely new it must be said – Adidas has published this style of content for a while, but has now revamped its corporate blog to make it much more visual – a magazine that appears consumer focused at first glance.

gameplan a

Branding and recruitment

On closer reading, the content itself feels like a mix of B2B and B2C.

The strategy is perhaps to present the more serious side of Adidas, seeding content in professional circles and positioning the brand as more important than merely athleisure (which you can get at Primark) or fashion (an area most sports brands play in) – a dedicated lifestyle brand, if you will.

But on the other hand, as well as promoting a serious sports brand, the content dovetails very nicely with Adidas’ careers website, which is promoted at certain points throughout the site.

An example is shown below including a Jobs Twitter feed embed and a call to action.

careers adidas

Content curation

It’s also pleasing to see GamePlan A using content curation in perhaps the smartest way I’ve seen it done of late.

Running a blog like this is pretty labour intensive, so being able to so thoughtfully embed third-party content, including pictures, pull-out quotes and then a content preview before linking out is a triumph.

adidas curated content

gameplan a

Engagement

There are more than 10,000 Adidas employees on LinkedIn – quite a community to begin with.

Each post here from GamePlan A seems to get 80 or so Likes and a couple of comments. Not too shabby.

On Twitter, GamePlan A has 16,000 followers – again, pretty good for a B2B venture in one vertical.

Content is all that can differentiate a big corporate

I’ve written previously about culture-washing in tech (an invented word), but I’m not sceptical at all about companies that want to talk about work.

Only by publishing and trying to maintain some degree of transparency can any company provide a window to the outside world.

That’s what I like about GamePlan A, it shows Adidas and its staff are making an effort to engage, and that in turn may attract the right kind of job candidates.

It’s not just with this new magazine, the careers site mentioned above has a whole wealth of editorial, too.

adidas careers

Conclusion

GamePlan A isn’t my cup of tea, but then again I’m probably not the right person to work at Adidas. I think this content will appeal to those that stumble across it who love sport and love business.

And in a digital landscape where the skills shortage has overtaken legacy tech as number one barrier to progress, creating this content is a no-brainer.

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