Adidas’ “Backyard Legends” campaign during the World Cup left me wondering whether modern marketing has become so obsessed with celebrating culture that it sometimes forgets to communicate with everyone outside it.
Every World Cup produces a handful of campaigns that become instant industry favorites. They dominate LinkedIn feeds, appear in creative newsletters, accumulate award predictions and quickly become shorthand for what “great brand storytelling” supposedly looks like. This year’s Adidas “Backyard Legends” campaign occupied exactly that space, arriving with all the ingredients marketers tend to celebrate. It was beautifully crafted, culturally aware, unapologetically authentic and deeply rooted in football (soccer) culture, which immediately positioned it as one of the tournament’s creative highlights.
I watched it several times because I assumed I must have missed something.
Then I watched it again.
Then I read the gushing commentary surrounding it.
And by the end of all that, I still wasn’t entirely sure what Adidas was trying to tell me.
That reaction says as much about modern marketing as it does about the campaign itself because I genuinely believe Adidas achieved exactly what it intended to achieve. The problem is that I increasingly wonder whether marketing has become too comfortable creating work that rewards cultural insiders while quietly accepting that everyone else will either catch up or simply move on.
The advertising industry has spent years encouraging brands to become more culturally fluent, and for good reason. Consumers have become increasingly skeptical of brands that parachute into communities they clearly do not understand, while audiences reward companies that demonstrate genuine familiarity with the worlds they hope to participate in. The era of generic, mass-market messaging has given way to campaigns built around specific communities, specific references and increasingly specific cultural signals that feel native to the people already inside them.
That evolution has undoubtedly produced better advertising than the painfully broad campaigns that dominated previous decades, but it has also introduced a different risk that receives considerably less attention. As brands become more fluent in culture, they also become more willing to assume cultural fluency from everyone watching. The result is advertising that sometimes feels less interested in bringing audiences into a world than in congratulating itself for already understanding it.
That was my experience with “Backyard Legends.”
The campaign is filled with texture, references, atmosphere and visual authenticity that devotees immediately recognize, yet I found myself admiring the craftsmanship without ever connecting emotionally to the idea. I never reached the moment where everything clicked together and I understood why this particular story belonged to Adidas rather than simply belonging to football itself. The campaign certainly communicated passion, but passion and persuasion are not always the same thing because one celebrates a culture while the other invites new people to care about it.
Perhaps that reaction simply means I wasn’t the intended audience. I’m the first to admit that this is extremely likely to be the case, despite my rabid love for the beautiful game.
That is a perfectly reasonable response, but it also raises a larger question about the direction of contemporary marketing. If campaigns increasingly optimize for the people already inside a community, what happens to everyone standing just outside it? Marketing has traditionally been about expanding audiences, introducing brands to new consumers and lowering the barriers to participation. Increasingly, however, some campaigns appear content speaking almost exclusively to those who already understand the language, the references and the rituals, treating accessibility as a compromise rather than an objective.
There is an important distinction between authenticity and exclusivity, even though the industry often treats them as interchangeable. Authenticity means representing a culture honestly without reducing it to stereotypes. Exclusivity means requiring audiences to possess cultural knowledge before they are allowed to appreciate the work. Those ideas occasionally overlap, but they are far from identical because the greatest cultural storytelling often welcomes outsiders rather than quietly reminding them they are outsiders.
Some of the most memorable sports advertising ever created accomplished exactly that balancing act. You did not need to play basketball to understand why Michael Jordan mattered. You did not need to surf to appreciate the emotional appeal behind Quiksilver’s best work. You did not need to understand every tactical nuance of soccer to feel something watching Nike’s greatest football campaigns because those advertisements translated sporting passion into universal human emotions. They did not dilute the culture. They interpreted it.
That may be the more difficult creative challenge facing brands today because audiences no longer reward superficial storytelling, yet they also cannot be expected to arrive with encyclopedic knowledge of every subculture a campaign hopes to celebrate. Great marketing builds bridges between communities. Average marketing assumes the bridge already exists.
The advertising industry’s enthusiasm for cultural fluency has perhaps created another unintended consequence. Creative teams increasingly judge campaigns according to whether they accurately represent a community, while spending comparatively less time asking whether the campaign communicates clearly to people outside that community. Those are fundamentally different questions, and answering one successfully does not automatically answer the other. A campaign can be impeccably authentic while remaining emotionally inaccessible, just as it can achieve extraordinary craft without ever explaining why a broader audience should care.
None of this suggests Adidas made a bad campaign because clearly many people connected with it far more deeply than I did. Instead, it raises a more interesting possibility that deserves greater discussion inside the marketing industry. Perhaps our definition of great advertising has quietly shifted away from communication and toward cultural signaling, rewarding work that demonstrates insider credibility even when that credibility comes at the expense of broader emotional connection.
That trade-off may become increasingly common as brands pursue younger audiences who expect greater cultural specificity and reject anything that feels manufactured. The temptation will be to move ever deeper into niche references, insider language and community validation because those signals create authenticity that cannot easily be replicated by competitors. The danger is that brands eventually become so committed to proving they belong within a culture that they stop helping anyone new discover why the culture mattered in the first place.
I may simply be wrong about “Backyard Legends,” (I probably am!) and perhaps that is part of the point. Great advertising should provoke discussion rather than universal agreement. Even so, I finished the campaign with a lingering feeling that I had watched something I was expected to admire rather than something that wanted to persuade me. For a World Cup campaign built around the world’s most universal sport, that felt like an unexpectedly narrow ambition, and it made me wonder whether the industry has become so focused on speaking authentically to insiders that it occasionally forgets the extraordinary power of inviting everyone else inside as well.