The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Marketing decision · 2024
adidas added two dots to a pitch to make it grammatically female
Arabic's sports words are feminine, so adidas painted two dots over a pitch's centre circle — the world's first female field — and girls' sign-ups doubled.
adidas
The solution
Most young Arab girls from conventional families grow up believing sport is not for them. Agency research behind the campaign found that 73% of girls in the region give up playing sport by age 14, because traditional Middle Eastern society has long implied that sports are inappropriate for women.
The dumb way to answer would be a campaign telling girls they can play. Havas Middle East instead looked at the language: in Arabic, the words around sport — ball, run, kick, jump, goal, shoot, pass, even the word sport itself — are grammatically feminine, written with the Ta Marbuta, a circle with two dots on top.
So adidas added the same two dots above the centre circle on the home pitch of Onyx FC, the UAE's only all-women-owned and operated football team, creating the world's first pitch with a gender: female. Teasers teased the linguistic fact, the team captain painted the dots, and content came from the new Female Field — a gesture so minimal that any venue could copy it.
The copying happened: basketball courts, beach pitches and even an ice-hockey rink became Female Fields. In the first week Onyx FC got 16,000+ searches, sign-ups to all-girl training programs rose 200%, and 27 female fields were made and counting. The campaign won the Glass Grand Prix at Dubai Lynx 2024 and a Gold at the London International Awards.
Why it worked
- The barrier was cultural meaning, so they changed meaning itself instead of arguing with it.
- A two-dot gesture was cheap and copyable, turning one pitch into a movement.
- Onyx FC gave the idea a real home, so the claim was lived, not staged.
- The act of women painting the field was itself the most shareable content.
What can be applied
When culture tells a group a domain isn't for them, don't fight the message head-on — change the symbol. A tiny, copyable gesture lets the audience propagate the fix themselves.
Aftermath
Within weeks of the launch, female fields were appearing across Dubai's basketball courts, beach pitches and even an ice-hockey rink, as other venues copied the two-dot gesture. The work won the Glass Grand Prix at Dubai Lynx 2024 and a Gold at the London International Awards, and it became adidas' regional proof point for women's sport.
Sources
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