adidas vs Nike: Who's winning FIFA26?

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Ok now, let’s get into what happened this week. 🚀

🚨 TRENDING TOPICS

✅ Scorsese just turned AI storyboarding into a serious creative signal

Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese joined Black Forest Labs, the German AI startup behind the FLUX image models,  last year as an adviser. Now, he’s showing what that role actually looks like in practice.

On Tuesday, Scorsese shared his first public test of the tool, using it on a single scene during preproduction. The use case is deliberately narrow: storyboarding. Not generated actors, sets, or final footage, but a new way to support the visual planning process he has relied on for decades.

“Cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve,” he told The New York Times.

WATCH HERE HOW HE USES IT

✅ Coors Light makes cold beer visible with thermal-camera DOOH

Coors Light’s new “Cold Vision” campaign, created by Rethink, uses thermal-camera visuals to highlight the brand’s long-running promise of cold refreshment.

That blue connects back to the brand’s colour-changing cans, where the mountains turn blue when the beer is cold enough to drink.

✅ San Miguel uses AR mirrors to show people their ‘Holiday self’

San Miguel has launched Holiday Self Mirror, an interactive campaign created with GUT Amsterdam that uses live AR technology to turn people’s reflections into holiday-ready versions of themselves.

⚡️ INDUSTRY DEEP DIVE

The first World Cup clash is Nike vs. adidas

Nike just dropped “Rip the Script”, a six-minute World Cup film packed with Cristiano Ronaldo, Mbappé, Haaland, LeBron James, Travis Scott, Kim Kardashian, Channing Tatum, Ted Lasso and more. It is big, loud, chaotic and designed to be picked apart frame by frame.

A few weeks earlier, adidas released “Backyard Legends”, led by Timothée Chalamet, with Messi, Bad Bunny, Lamine Yamal, Jude Bellingham, Trinity Rodman, Zidane, Beckham and more. But the emotional center is different: kids, local pitches, pickup football, and the idea that legends can come from anywhere.

On the surface, both brands are doing the same thing: long-form World Cup films with massive casts.But they are not playing the same game.

Nike is building from the top down. Adidas is building from the ground up.

Nike’s world is made of icons, celebrities, collabs, Easter eggs and cultural overload. It feels less like a football ad and more like an entertainment universe. Every cameo gives another audience a reason to share it. Every detail becomes something for the internet to decode. Adidas goes for a different feeling. Backyard Legends is still packed with famous faces, but it is anchored in something softer: the memory of playing before the pressure arrived. Before stadiums, contracts and cameras, there was just a ball, a space, and someone claiming they were unbeatable.

That is the real branding difference.

The more interesting part is how both brands are using the World Cup as a world-building exercise. These are not just ads anymore. They are campaign universes.

A World Cup campaign used to be a big heroic film with a line everyone remembered.

Now it has to be a launchpad: for edits, reactions, product drops, collabs, creator breakdowns, press angles, fan theories, and whatever comes next.

That makes the early FIFA ad war less about who “won” this week, and more about who can keep their world alive the longest. The real challenge is not making one impressive film. It’s building a campaign world people want to keep entering after the launch moment is over.

🧠 WEEKLY AI CREATIVE

This is part 11 of our weekly series where we test the AI tools everyone is talking about and figure out what they’re actually useful for.

This week, we imagined a fictional collaboration between two icons of exploration and performance: National Geographic × Arc’teryx

We used GPT Image 2 to design a concept shell built around alpine protection, field documentation, and the iconic yellow frame. Then Kling 3.0 brought it to life as a cinematic outdoor workflow, from observation into experience.

AI ad test: National Geographic × Arc’teryx

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