Like the everyday athletes it profiles, Dick's Sporting Goods remains a bit of an unsung hero in the sports marketing world. But that continues to change, thanks to its consistently strong advertising from Anomaly.
The company prefers unknown athletes to superstars, and the purity of real sports moments to the phony glitz and glamour of hero worship. This was memorably communicated in simple yet pulsating ads like "Every Pitch,""Every Snap" and "Focus and Explode." (The former was one of Adweek's 10 best commercials of 2013; the latter just won a gold Lion in Film Craft at Cannes last month.)
In its latest spot, Dick's takes a hoary old sports cliché—that a lifetime of work prepares you for brief yet crucial on-the-field moments—and breathes new life into it, thanks to some nice parallel framing and editing that stitch together three different stories (from football, soccer and basketball) into a coherent whole.
We're only a week removed from one of the most dramatic examples of seizing the moment in professional sports. As parents stock up on sports gear this fall, this ad will remind them that their kids can be heroes, too—ready to seize the moment when opportunity knocks.
CREDITS
Client: Dick's Sporting Goods
Agency: Anomaly, New York
Director: Max Malkin
Production Company: Prettybird
Co-Founder / Executive Producer: Kerstin Emhoff
VP / Executive Producer: Ali Brown
Head of Production: Tracy Hauser
Line Producer: Pedro Aragao De Oliveira
Director of Photography: Peter Simonite
Production Designer Kells Jesse
Editor: Peter Johnson