A lot has changed since 1983, the year that Adidas released adicolor, its customizable white-on-white sneaker with a set of seven colored markers. At the time, Swatch watches and parachute pants were high fashion, while Michael Jackson was still cool and hip-hop was still underground. Camcorders, CDs and the Internet were in their nascent stages, the FCC permitted Motorola to begin testing cellular phone service, the Apple Macintosh wasn't even invented yet, and customizable was still a radical concept.

Fast forward to today and hip-hop is ubiquitous while Jackson is AWOL. Camcorders, CDs, the web and cells are bundled into one, and Apple rules the handheld world with its iPod. And customizable is no longer an oddity, but a necessity as everything from cars to clothes to content can be self-determined.

So when Adidas was deciding upon a communications strategy to promote the relaunch of adicolor, it didn't seem the least bit out of place to do so with seven short films created specifically for handheld platforms such as the iPod and PSP, which were then to be disseminated virally.

Created in partnership with New York-based trend marketing agency Idealogue, Adidas lured seven of the commercial world's most creative and innovative directors with the promise of complete creative control. Seven colors were meted out between seven directors who were free to interpret their color as they saw fit: Tronic (White), Smuggler's Happy (Green), Furlined's Charlie White (Pink), The Director's Bureau's Roman Coppola (Red), Psyop (Blue), Saiman Chow of Transistor Studios (Black) and Neill Blomkamp of RSA (Yellow). The short films were then released, one a week, via emails and on select content aggregate sites such as Youtube.com and Google Video.

"It was the convergence of opportunity, technology and mobility," says Idealogue creative director Jacqueline Bosnjak, noting that the idea to create content specifically for handheld devices came from both the release of the video iPod and William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition. "We were inspired by the idea that there could be content that people could collect and transfer to handheld devices."

Because the project was not tied to a specific product, but rather intended to "celebrate color, customization and personal expression," according to Adidas Originals global communications director Abby Guyer, it was approached more like an art project than advertising. "The directors that we chose we feel have a good deal of underground street cred," says Guyer. "At the same time, they've all done commercial work, so it's not super obscure."

"We were looking for directors who were enthusiastic about the project and had a recognition of how great an opportunity it was," adds executive producer Sara Seiferheld, who says the goal was to curate a diverse group of filmmakers.

The result is, predictably, a diverse set of films. Launched on April 4, Tronic's "White Out" was the first to hit the net, featuring a slithery Jenna Jameson having a go at a whack-a-mole game. Not only did the piece set up the rest of the films nicely, throwing to the rest of the colors, but it piqued the interest of the web demo.

Happy followed with Green, a story about greed and desire in a future world. Meanwhile, Psyop winnowed down over 18,000 photographs to create a blue-eyed view of its Lower East Side stomping grounds, Saiman Chow turned in a black and white stop-motion piece about a down-and-out, hard-drinking panda, and Neill Blomkamp traded CG for an intense live-action action sequence, which he says evokes the replicants from Blade Runner.

One of the more intriguing films released at press time comes from visual artist Charlie White. His film for Pink features a young girl in a candyfloss bedroom who's slowly subsumed by her pink surroundings before being transformed into a jewel-encrusted object. Says White: "At first I thought black would be cool, you know, hyperbolic Darth Vader insanity. But I chose Pink because it's unexpected in relation to me and my work."

All seven films will be hosted on Adidas' website as of May 10.

Given that directors weren't required to present treatments, dailies or final cuts, and that use of the product was optional, was there any concern on Adidas' part over the creative output?

"With a project like this there has to be an element of trust," says Guyer. "That's why we chose directors we respected and whose creativity and vision our audience would connect with."

Drazen Bosnjak, owner of music house Q Department, composed the tracks for five of the seven films, as well as the project's audio tag, making him one of the only people to have seen all of the works before their release. He says he's most pleased with how well-adjusted the films are, given the absence of client input. "We proved that we don't need a client to make interesting footage, and soon clients will realize that interesting footage is all they have to put out to get recognition. I can see art films that have a more subtle mnemonic ID replacing the status quo."

Though the detailed demographic information available is always appealing, as with any viral project, under-the-radar distribution can be hit or miss. Not for adicolor, though, which by April 11 had over 2.1 million viewers and had already gobbled up the majority of the bandwidth allocated for the duration of the two-month rollout.

"With each new release the numbers are climbing exponentially for all films, which shows us that people are coming back to view the next release, and the series as a whole is compelling," says Jacqueline Bosnjak, noting that after the first day alone, "White Out" received hits from the US and UK to Slovenia and Malaysia.

"The spectacle is the commodity and that's been going on since the beginning of television," adds Idealogue creative director Mark Beukes. "Mass information is going to be disseminated to a lot of different people and personalized and customized by people, post-TiVo. This is definitely a direction that media is going to go."

Adicolor>http://www.adidas.com/adicolor
Idealogue>http://www.idealogue.com
Q Department>http://www.qdepartment.com