Welcome to edition 124 of The SEG3 Report, and this week, I’m exploring the adidas x Toca Boca collaboration, how it both shifts a cultural norm and creates commercial opportunity (and I get sentimental about being a Girl In Sport).

Plus, some speed reads on the state of gaming and digital collectibles:

Let’s go!

I talk a bit in this newsletter about not really being a sports person, but that’s not entirely true. From the ages of 7 through 14, I was a competitive swimmer (the 100 and 200 metre butterfly were my events!), and I loved it. But, like a lot of young women, I stopped. For me it was a mix of factors - I aged out of my ‘group’, and suddenly, I was swimming with 16- and 17-year-olds who barely knew my name. Gone was the locker room chatter and mid-practice giggles. I left because I lost the social fabric that made swimming so enjoyable. 

Still, having been a swimmer is a fundamental part of my identity, even though I haven’t swum like that in years. I went on to work as a learn-to-swim instructor, and became a lifeguard as my summer job before University. Being a swimmer taught me discipline, to show up on time, and brought me a lot of joy. I look back on the memories fondly, but I can’t help but think about the ‘what if’. What if I had just kept swimming (to quote a famous Pixar fish!). 

As ever, my tangent does connect to this week’s topic, I promise.

Spin Master's Toca Boca has teamed up with adidas to bring the brand into Toca Boca World, the studio's open-ended dress-up-and-build app that pulls in close to 60 million players a month and has, by this point, become something like a digital hometown for a huge slice of Gen Alpha. 

The collaboration adds a free outdoor "Home Designer" location built around basketball, football, skating and volleyball, a run of adidas Originals-inspired style packs pulling from Firebird, Superstar and Adicolor, and a small set of limited-edition extras that include a yoga mat, a sports bag, and (the detail I loved) digital period-proof sportswear.

The stated ambition, from both brands, is to keep tween girls playing sport for longer than they currently do. By age 14, girls are dropping out of organised sport at close to twice the rate of boys, according to research from the Women's Sports Foundation, and the reasons that come up again and again in that research are the same: body image, comfort, the general social self-consciousness that arrives with puberty. Which is why the fact that this particular collaboration is choosing to name these issues explicitly is so impactful.

All of this has another, and not explicitly named but equally important, benefit: fostering brand loyalty with adidas for tween girls.

Most of what's in this drop is a familiar and enjoyable version of a standard fashion-gaming-collab. There’s the ubiquitous three stripes reimagined as mix-and-match digital pieces, plus premium style packs inspired by adidas Originals collections, including Firebird, Superstar, and Adicolor (a treat for parents downloading and playing alongside their children, tapping into a nostalgia factor a Gen-Alpha likely has no relation to, but gives parents a bit of fun, too).

But the most interesting (and I say that with a positive bend!) detail is the period-proof sportswear, because unlike everything else in the drop, it isn't decorating an avatar so much as naming a barrier. Talking about menstruation is still hard for so many people to do, and for tween girls who are already self-conscious, it’s a real barrier to playing sport.

By naming it explicitly within the game, it opens up an avenue to genuine conversation (whether it’s with a parent or coach) that may actually move the needle on girls feeling comfortable and confident enough to address it when it invariably becomes a real moment in their lives. It also reinforces a positive association with adidas for these tween girls. And as we’ve covered before in the episode of The Speakeasy with branded entertainment veteran Carlotta Rossi Spencer, with younger audiences choosing products based on shared values, this is a smart long-term play for adidas.

None of this is entirely new emotional-marketing territory. Always ran its #KeepHerPlaying campaign with the Women's Sports Foundation for close to a decade, funding local sports grants and running ad campaigns built on almost exactly the same confidence-building framing that is present in Toca Boca’s press release.

What that decade of grants and TV spots never quite reached, though, is the exact moment so many girls experience in a locker or changing room, on a pitch or in a pool: the physical instant of being looked at, which is very often the actual thing that makes a kid stop showing up. 

The digital sandbox in Toca Boca shifts the gaze from anxiety-inducing to empowering, because it becomes the players’ own gaze. A girl can build her own outdoor court, dress her character in kit that fits the way she wants it to fit, and explore the identity of "someone who plays sport" with nobody watching and nothing at stake.

Of course, what is yet to be seen is how this digital sandbox then carries over into the real world both in terms of actual culture shift and also for adidas in capturing a new demographic of young girls. But given all we know about how fandom and wearing your identity shapes behaviour, there’s certainly evidence that it could. 

At SEG3 LA, Spin Master's Yves Saada shared the strategy behind the flip-side of this one: its own IP going out to meet an audience rather than someone else's IP coming in. "We look for audience similarities with games we want to partner with,” he said.

Duh, I hear you cry. But the logic isn’t always so obvious, and it’s something often overlooked in favour of sheer reach. It’s what Dentsu’s Yoshi Nakano discussed at SEG3 London from the brand side, and BBC Studios’ Shelley Macintyre explored from the IP side in her episode of our podcast The Speakeasy: you always have to return to your core value, whether it’s your brand’s or your IP’s, when you enter a collaboration.

In the adidas x Toca Boca case, this ‘core value’ test holds, and Spin Master’s strategy that Yves explains works well in reverse, too. Toca Boca is the host now, and adidas is the guest walking into somebody else's built-up audience. The audience fit holds up well, too, because Toca Boca World's whole premise is unstructured, rules-free self-expression, and sport already turns out to be one of the more natural things an eight-to-twelve-year-old chooses to role-play inside it without anyone prompting her to.

It isn’t the first time adidas has looked to gaming as a lever for youth participation. Back in edition 10, we covered its Roblox store launching alongside UEFA's "Make Moves" campaign. What they didn’t do here was simply repeat strategy, though.

In this case, there are two hand-in-hand goals in mind:

The strategy is built around doing those at the same time in a way that feels far more unique than just repeating a gaming strategy play. They’re doing what we’ve talked about so many times before: building for the platform and its audience specifically. 

What this got me thinking about, though, was something beyond just the game. adidas and Toca Boca are investing right at the very top of a funnel, trying to build sport-and brand-affinity in girls years before life complicates it, and that's smart, forward-looking work. But I couldn’t help but wonder: what’s waiting for her further down that same funnel, once this same girl is grown up, if she is a fan (or a player) by the time she's an adult.

I instantly thought back to Lucy Mills presentation at SEG3 London. Drawn from structured consultations with 27 women's football clubs and two leagues across 16 countries, the headline of her finding was that fan engagement is the single biggest growth priority across every club in the sample, regardless of size or market, which lines up neatly with everything adidas and Toca Boca are trying to build.

The sticking point is what comes next: fan data, per Mills, is the most underleveraged commercial asset in women’s football, and 41% of the clubs surveyed don't have a CRM at all, running fan relationships instead off spreadsheets and manual exports.

None of this is down to cultural resistance, Lucy said; leadership appetite for building this infrastructure is consistently high. But what it means is there's a real mismatch happening. Brands are getting increasingly sophisticated about the very top of this funnel, building identity and affinity in girls before they've even picked up a ball, while the professional infrastructure waiting at the bottom of that same funnel is, in a lot of cases, still working off Excel. 

That's not a criticism of the clubs, who are working with real budget and resourcing constraints that no amount of leadership appetite can fix alone; it's more a genuine opportunity sitting in plain sight for brands willing to look further down the funnel. 

Lucy pointed to leagues already running shared services, and suggested a brand with a specific commercial interest could activate across a cohort of clubs at once, getting its own return while genuinely helping build the infrastructure the sport needs collectively, so that the kind of collaboration and affinity Toca Boca and adidas are building can have long-term impact.

There’s so much good in this collaboration, and I do like to be a bit optimistic about the state of the world sometimes. I don’t know that there’s a game out there that would’ve kept me on the swim team, but I truly hope that this collaboration does that for tween girls. 

Fundamentally, of course, the other goal of all of this is to build brand affinity with adidas. But I think two things can be true at the same time: the outcome goal can be both commercial and cultural. And, frankly, it’s a smart move! (I still gravitate towards Speedo as a brand from years of having their logo on everything I wore.)  

What I also hope to see is that a brand like adidas, having already found its way to the top of this consumer/audience/fan funnel, might be just as well placed to show up at the other end of it, too. Not just as a media partner buying awareness and affinity, but helping to create the infrastructure that would actually let sports clubs recognise the exact girl this collaboration is trying to reach, years from now, the day she finally walks onto a pitch, a stadium, or a court. And, of course, continue to build that brand loyalty along the way.

Sekai plans to expand into anime-inspired AAA games and live events.

TL;DR

Why you should care

The 93% organic figure is the signal number, even though obviously the 500,000 downloads is impressive. That half a million people found and installed a card app for a show that's been running since 2002, without Sekai buying its way into their feeds, shows that the fandom was already primed to show up the moment something official and well-made existed.

That distinction, “official and well-made”, is key. Unofficial Naruto apps and fan projects have existed for years. What Sekai got right was patience: a year and a half in Japan, direct correspondence with the manga’s author, and a deal that nearly died before the author personally signed off. IP holders in anime are notoriously protective, and Sekai's route in says something about what earns that trust: demonstrated fluency in the source material and a willingness to be told no repeatedly without walking away.

The shipping mechanism is a repeatable strategy for folks looking to build something similar. A new card drop every quarter, an active Discord the team says it replies to directly, and a plan to let user feedback steer the roadmap is the same participation-over-passivity logic we've flagged before. Give fans something to do, and they’ll stick around and actively engage.

Sekai's next move, stadium-scale Naruto live events pitched as "the Super Bowl of Anime," is very interesting, and chimes with the other strategy we’ve discussed before: the three layers of any activation are a product experience, a digital experience, and a life experience.

Arguably in this case, 1 and 2 are the same: the show and the colletibles are both the product and the digital experience, feeding back to each other. But an in-person ‘Super Bowl of Anime’ is the life experience, and having one makes sense.

Film and TV IP moving into large-scale physical experiences is a pattern we've been tracking, particularly with anime as the category has caught up to the NFL in cultural relevance among Gen Z, according to Dentsu’s fan intelligence data Yoshi shared at SEG3 London.

What’s worth watching is whether Sekai can translate a mobile card game's organic trust into something that fills a stadium. My instinct, having attended Netflix’s One Piece fan event in Tokyo last year, is a resounding yes.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!