Did adidas Copy its Latest Anthony Edwards AE 1 Ad from Reebok?
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The marketing surrounding the adidas AE 1, the first signature sneaker for Anthony Edwards, has been unmatched in the current landscape of performance basketball models. The “Believe That” tagline, timely videos posted after big in-game moments, and the simple yet effective videos of Edwards on an orange backdrop have helped draw more attention to what many believed was the sneaker of the year for 2024. However, Steve Stoute, an entrepreneur who has worked in the music industry and advertising, pointed out that a new series of ads for the AE 1 is eerily similar to an advertisement he helped create for Reebok in 2003.
In an advertisement for Reebok Basketball’s ATR (Above The Rim) series, starring NBA athletes Baron Davis, Steve Francis, Jason Richardson, and Kenyon Martin, two detectives approached a crime scene with a chalk outline of a body on a basketball court. After looking at the footprint left behind by a Reebok ATR sneaker, they determined it had to be one of the aforementioned Reebok athletes who posterized the victim.
More recently, adidas has run a series of ad spots featuring Ice-T, who stars in the long-time-running TV show Law & Order: SVU, in which he and another detective find a chalk outline and determine that Anthony Edward posterized the victim. They list off some of the features of the AE 1, including its cushioning system, the generative support wing structure of the upper, and the traction pattern, before Edwards comes in to dunk on Ice-T. The ad was posted online on Saturday after Edwards’ posterizing dunk in-game against the Philadelphia 76ers.
The structure of the ad and the general narrative are nearly identical, though there is some extra backstory here. In 2003, Reebok was owned by adidas, though the advertisement for the Reebok ATR was made by Steve Stoute’s creative agency, Translation.
Like all creative endeavors, the past often influences the present, whether films paying homage to classics from decades prior, musicians sampling or interpolating artists that inspired them, or even advertisements harkening back to different eras to hit on nostalgia. There rarely is, or ever will be, something genuinely original that is free from outside influence. Every brand, creative agency, artist, designer, you name it, has borrowed ideas from others in the past or their contemporaries.
Stoute isn’t wrong for pointing out this “copying,” as he puts it in his Instagram caption, but with the advertisement having been made over two decades ago and a whole new generation of consumers and basketball players who likely never saw this campaign, adidas (and the creative agency responsible for the ad) borrowing elements from it isn’t a ripoff.
Again, think of how the hip-hop genre has heavily borrowed from R&B and other genres through sampling. The untrained and uninitiated may believe this is just blatant copying, but there’s an art form around being able to take something from the past and bring it to the modern day.
Only time will tell if adidas will respond to the claim or if it will just simply get lost in the world of social media that changes every minute. download the Sole Retriever mobile app to stay updated on the latest releases, raffles, news, and more in the sneaker and streetwear world.
Sneakerhead from South Florida who turned his passion into a career. Concerts, music, trying new restaurants, and catching the latest movies are some of the things I enjoy when not writing for Sole Retriever. Email: nick@soleretriever.com
