adidas 50/50, a 2019 student campaign by Miami Ad School Mumbai, proposed buying equal TV and print airtime to close the gender gap in Indian sports media.
adidas 50/50 Tackles Sports Media Bias Against Women in India
adidas 50/50 is a 2019 integrated student campaign created by Miami Ad School Mumbai, proposing that adidas purchase equal television airtime and newspaper space to equalise men's and women's sports coverage across India's mainstream media landscape.
The campaign was published in India in March 2019. Conceived as a single integrated media asset, it belongs to the fashion and retail services category and represents one of the more structurally ambitious student concepts to emerge from the country's advertising education sector in that period. Rather than producing a traditional brand spot, the campaign's core mechanic was a media-buying proposition: that adidas, as a commercial actor with significant purchasing power, could directly correct the imbalance in how women's sport is represented across broadcast television and print newspapers in India. The brand would not merely sponsor women athletes — it would buy the column inches and airtime that the media industry had historically withheld from them.
The Clapboard Score for adidas 50/50 is 63 out of 100, reflecting a concept with genuine strategic clarity and cultural relevance to the Indian market, tempered by the constraints inherent in a student execution with a single documented asset and no verified real-world deployment. The campaign did not receive documented recognition across Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, Webby, or WARC databases, according to Clapboard's own research. Nevertheless, as a conceptual statement on gender equality and sports bias, 50/50 occupies a coherent position within the broader trajectory of adidas brand thinking on inclusion and performance for women in sport.
Women in Indian sport receive disproportionately less media coverage than their male counterparts. This is the structural inequity that adidas 50/50 set out to address, not through an awareness campaign alone, but through a proposed intervention in the commercial media economy itself. The insight driving the campaign is precise: advertising spend shapes editorial priority, and a brand with adidas's scale in the fashion and retail services sector could redirect that dynamic.
The global sportswear market reached approximately US$181 billion in 2019, representing growth of more than US$7 billion year-over-year, according to data cited by brandminds.com. Sportswear accounted for roughly 18.3% of global apparel expenditure that year, according to the same source. Within this context, adidas and Nike together generated more than US$65 billion in 2019 revenue, according to fourweekmba.com, illustrating the purchasing leverage that a brand like adidas could credibly bring to bear on media inventory. Nike, adidas's primary global competitor, had already established its own gender-equity credentials through campaigns including its 2019 Dream Crazier spot, making the competitive pressure to demonstrate authentic commitment to women in sports both real and urgent for adidas in markets such as India. Puma, another direct competitor in the Indian performance and fashion market, was similarly expanding its women's activewear positioning during this period.
In India specifically, the gap between men's and women's sports coverage in television and print had been widely documented by sports media observers, creating fertile ground for a campaign that named the problem and proposed a funded, structural solution rather than a symbolic gesture. The 50/50 concept located adidas inside that solution.
adidas 50/50 operates as a concept campaign rather than a produced broadcast execution. The creative team at Miami Ad School Mumbai built the campaign around a single, replicable idea: that the ratio of men's to women's sports coverage in Indian media could be corrected if adidas committed its advertising spend to purchasing the deficit. The name 50/50 encodes the objective — equal representation — directly into the campaign identity, making the proposition legible without further explanation.
Art director Siddhant Karale led the visual development of the campaign, with copywriting by Yashashree Samant and Apaar Singhal. Creative strategy was developed by Mehak Marwah. Faculty supervision was provided by Siddhi Ranade, Rebecca Daniel, and Rohan Mathew, whose guidance shaped the campaign's integrated-medium framing. The decision to classify the work as integrated medium — spanning both television airtime and newspaper space — reinforces the idea that sports media bias in India is not a platform-specific problem but a systemic one requiring action across channels simultaneously.
The single documented media asset that represents the campaign's public face carries significant conceptual weight precisely because the idea itself is the creative output. In this respect, 50/50 follows a tradition of student campaign thinking in which the strategy is the execution: if the proposal is accepted, the media plan becomes the creative work. This is a demanding standard for a student concept to meet, and it reflects the ambition of the Miami Ad School Mumbai cohort that produced it. The campaign's integrated framing — fashion, retail services, performance, and gender equality converging in one media-buying argument — gives it coherence across all the categories it touches.
No verified performance data for the adidas 50/50 campaign is publicly available. As a student concept rather than a deployed adidas corporate campaign, 50/50 was never activated at media scale, and no campaign-specific sales lift, brand-tracking, awareness, or conversion data has been published, according to Clapboard's research. The campaign did not receive documented award recognition at Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, Webby, or WARC in 2019. For context, a separate Miami Ad School and adidas student campaign, PairUp — Walk in My Shoes, received a 2019 New York Festivals finalist certificate in the Positive World Impact category, according to nyfadvertising.com, illustrating the kind of recognition that student work in this space can achieve.
Evaluated on structural effectiveness, 50/50 demonstrates three qualities that give it lasting analytical interest. First, its proposed mechanism — commercial media buying as a corrective instrument for gender bias — is directly actionable by a brand of adidas's scale and credibility in fashion and retail services. Second, its framing in India in 2019 captures a moment when the conversation around women in sports was intensifying across South Asian media, giving the concept genuine cultural timing. Third, the compression of strategy and execution into a single integrated asset forces clarity of argument in a way that many produced campaigns avoid. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects these structural strengths alongside the inherent limitations of a student execution: one documented asset, no real-world deployment, and no measurable impact on sports media representation in India.
adidas 50/50 is a student integrated campaign created by Miami Ad School Mumbai and published in India in March 2019. It proposed that adidas purchase equal television airtime and newspaper space for women's sports coverage, directly addressing sports media bias through a commercial media-buying mechanism rather than a conventional advertising message.
The campaign was created at Miami Ad School Mumbai. Art director Siddhant Karale, copywriters Yashashree Samant and Apaar Singhal, and creative strategist Mehak Marwah produced the concept. Faculty supervisors Siddhi Ranade, Rebecca Daniel, and Rohan Mathew guided the work, according to Clapboard's documented credits for the campaign.
adidas 50/50 did not receive verified recognition at Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, Webby, or WARC, according to Clapboard's research. A separate Miami Ad School and adidas student campaign, PairUp — Walk in My Shoes, earned a 2019 New York Festivals finalist certificate in the Positive World Impact category, according to nyfadvertising.com.
The campaign proposed that adidas use its advertising budget to buy the television airtime and print newspaper space that Indian media was not allocating to women's sports. This reframed gender equality from a messaging position into a structural media intervention, arguing that commercial spending power could directly correct coverage imbalance in India.
adidas 50/50 holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strategic clarity and cultural relevance to the Indian sports media context, balanced against its student-concept status, a single documented media asset, and the absence of any verified real-world deployment or measurable performance outcomes.
adidas developed its Here to Create brand platform by 2016, featuring women athletes including Caroline Wozniacki, Candace Parker, and Robin Arzón, according to adruby.com. The 50/50 student concept extends that thinking into India's specific media landscape, proposing a funded structural solution to sports bias rather than a symbolic creative statement.
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