Adidas made Luis Suarez a poster boy for its campaign, There Will Be Haters. Then he bit an opponent. Oops.

On January 21, the Daily Mail ran the following headline online.

Forget adidas’ stupid advert: Luis Suarez is hated after his biting episodes, not because of the way Barcelona’s striker walks or talks.

This is an extract from that story:

“Shamelessly, adidas’s posters at the World Cup showed Suarez, teeth bared, like a ferocious beast, and tried to make a selling point of his previous poor behaviour. 

They were hastily taken down when he bit an opponent for the third time in his career, and fans took to posing with the pictures as if putting their heads in a lion’s mouth. Suarez and adidas were mocked mercilessly, but deservedly.”

Iris Worldwide UK had created the campaign, There Will Be Haters, for Adidas UK, to get people excited about being hated for owning a pair of Adidas boots:

“And they hate your shiny new boots. They hate your boots, because they wish they were in them,” the ad concludes, after using soccer stars Luis Suárez, Gareth Bale, James Rodríguez and Karim Benzema to illustrate that talent attracts haters.

All of these players have been “hated” in the news for bad behaviour.

“They hate the way you walk,” “they hate the way you talk. They hate the way you stand up and the way you stand out,” score “all the goals” and “all the girls”, the ad declares.

The campaign’s target market (young men) probably does feel that its heroes get a poor wrap in news and social media. And the spot does a good job of playing on that, with its humorously exaggerated views of what haters hate about these players.

Sadly, the media (haters) are doing most of the talking. Not all were wowed by the images in Adidas’ global World Cup campaign either: