You may not have ever heard of Anta. But almost every person in China knows its name. It’s China’s #1 sports brand.
China is a market of 1.4 billion people. A lot of brands want a big piece of that. Wieden + Kennedy has been doing a spectacular job of making Nike synonymous with sport there. But in April last year, local brand, Anta, became the leading domestic sportswear company selling more sneakers in China than Nike. In China, Nike is #2.
Its revenues were more than 10 bn yuan (US$15.4 billion, up 24.7% year-on-year. It sold 40 million pairs of shoes in China.
In 2017, the sports and fitness industry is an estimated 0.7% of GDP in China and China intends to grow the market to more than 3 trillion yuan (US$460 billion), 1% of GDP, by 2020.
So competition is fierce.
Anta was the official sponsor of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, providing uniforms and equipment for ten Chinese national teams: gymnastics, trampoline, weightlifting, wrestling, judo, boxing, taekwondo, rowing, canoeing and water polo.
In January, it sponsored the study, China gets its game on: The emerging power of China’s sports and fitness industry, a research report written by the Economist Corporate Network. It is the first time a sportswear company had come together with an international economic and financial media outlet, to research the scale and potential of the sports and fitness industry in China.
Meanwhile Nike has partnered with China’s Ministry of Education to encourage physical activity in schools.
But there’s also advertising. Anta’s agency is MullenLowe China, and while its work lacks the sophisticated ideas of Wieden + Kennedy’s campaigns for Nike, it more than makes up for that in the power it evokes through production.
This is Anta’s Olympics sponsorship ad, Breakthrough:
The ad was directed by Mario Zozin and produced by A New Life Films Shanghai, with DOP, Jann Doeppert.
But much of its power comes from its edit, and that is the work of Australian, Matt Osbourne, who was freelance editor in China at the time and has recently joined Cutters in Tokyo. Osbourne has a knack of squeezing every last drop of emotional oomph out of an ad through his interweaving of action and sound. In 2011, he was awarded Best Editing in a Music Video at the Australia Screen Editors Awards.
The Olympic campaign was preceded by Play is ALL. Anta had identified soccer as the spearhead of its intended growth spurt in 2015 and young players as its biggest opportunity. This film talks to those young players, in the voice of Zheng Zhi – Asian Footballer of the Year and the brand ambassador, reminding them that football is not necessarily related to big ambitions like performing in the national team, but is a game whose ultimate reward is happiness.
Again, production stars:
