Run DMC x Adidas: This is how the first advertising contract between a music group and a sports brand came into life

During the 80s, part of American society associated sneakers with drug dealers and juvenile delinquency, especially when it came from the black community. In this breeding ground, Run-DMC (@rundmc) decided to act on this criminalization of sneakers with a song that has made history: “MY ADIDAS”.

The song began to become the rallying cry of the young people of the time who felt identified with what the rap group was doing. At that time, the song had already been playing in the streets for three months. The rappers’ music was creating a new phenomenon that reached the ears of Adidas. One of the brand’s managers in Los Angeles, Angelo Anastasio, traveled from California to New York to witness the phenomenon.

It was a performance at Madison Square Garden that Anastasio witnessed that really changed everything. When the rappers came out to sing “My Adidas”, they asked the audience to take off their sneakers and lift them up. Then, 40,000 people in a packed Madison Square Garden held up their Adidas to the beat of the song. The Adidas representative was perplexed by what he was witnessing.

Back in Los Angeles, he told his superiors what he had seen. They sent him to Germany to speak directly with the Dassler family, who owned the brand. After the conversation, they made a decision that would mark a before and after in the history not only of rap but also of fashion: to sponsor Run-DMC to be the image of Adidas, in the same way they did with athletes and sportsmen.

In exchange for 1.5 million dollars at the time (around 1,3 millones de euros), the rappers began to promote Adidas clothing, and also to design collections with the brand. This synergy allowed Adidas to gain recognition in the United States and hip-hop to gain popularity on the old continent.

Today, we cannot imagine a world without collaborations between artists and sports fashion. Some of the most important are Bad Bunny with Adidas, Rihanna with Puma, Beyonce’s Ivy Park or Kanye’s Yeezy. And so we could go on ad infinitum. But when Run DMC came into play, sports brands only collaborated with athletes.

The agreement between Adidas and Run DMC succeeded in legitimizing hip-hop culture, previously confined to the margins of society. It not only challenged the negative views surrounding specifically black men living in urban communities. It also paved the way and laid the groundwork for future artists to collaborate with brands. And consequently, bringing urban culture to a much wider audience.