Ads Review - Kinetic Society Purchase Pathway Ad
This week I’m reviewing an ad from Kinetic Society, a company that makes custom sports jerseys. I came across this ad on Instagram about a month ago, and was immediately impressed by the immersive way they showed their product purchase pathway. I’ll break down why this ad works, and a few ideas to make it better.
Why it works
Purchase Pathway
Marketing thought-leader, Donald Miller, constantly preaches that if customers are confused, they won’t buy. This ad takes that philosophy to heart, clearing up any confusion about what Kinetic Society does, and how to buy from them. At its core, this ad is a smartphone screen recording of someone customizing a few different products on the site. If nothing else, this ad achieves the goal of showing customers exactly how they can customize and purchase their products. Typically, I wouldn’t recommend a simple website screen recording, but the way Kinetic Society goes about it makes the experience great.
Engaging style
This ad is constructed with an engaging style, purely built for the modern day. The transition effects, the picture-in-picture, the in-your-face sound design; all of these come together to create an ad that captures your attention on social today. This ad won’t be cool in a year–it’ll be played-out and a bit cheesy. But right now, this ad captures the attention of social scrollers. This is why digital advertising is so interesting. It’s built for the modern day to capture attention in this moment. Not for next year, not even for next quarter. For today.
Cultural relevancy
The first jersey that’s customized in the ad says “Kentucky” and “Harlow.” This is a reference to the newly popular rapper, Jack Harlow, who reps Kentucky like no one ever has before. The second Jersey says “Chicago” and “GOAT,” paired with the number 23. This is a reference to Michael Jordan, one of the greatest basketball players of all time who wore the number 23 and played for the Chicago Bulls. The third Jersey says “California,” “Mamba,” and the number 8. This pays homage to the late great Kobe Bryant, who played for the LA Lakers, wore number 8 (at the beginning of his career), and was nicknamed Mamba. This approach creates strong associations for Kinetic Society with a few cultural icons, without forcing them to secure name licensing rights for the real jerseys.
Ideas to make it better
Call-to-action
Even after showing the entire purchase pathway, Kinetic Society neglects to include a call-to-action at the end of the ad. They may have shied away from this, feeling that their ad already leaned too far toward the performance side of The Marketing Spectrum. But my thought process here is that the ad is already a performance ad, so lean into that by adding a call-to-action. Something like “Create your custom jersey today” could be simple and strong. Kinetic Society can always balance out their marketing perception by creating cool branded-only content.
Hyper-targeted strategy
The selection of names in this ad obviously skews hard to 20-35 year old male basketball fans. I’d be interested to see Kinetic Society create ads similar to this one, hyper-targeted to different audiences. They could create ads for female soccer fans, older baseball fans, and even obscure associated niches like entrepreneurs or digital creators. Wouldn’t it be fun to see an Elon Musk jersey with “Tesla” on the front, and number the 182 on the back (for his $182 billion net worth)? Just me?
Closing
This is a great ad. The concept was simple, the execution was smart, and I’m sure it’s performing well for Kinetic Society.
Do you have an ad that you want me to review? DM it to me on Instagram.
