Social Rocket
Adidas and Gamefam won the award for best partnership at the Digiday Awards on 27 October 2026. The Adidas Football Festival inside the Roblox game FIFA Super Soccer was honoured. Behind the award is a four-week activation from late 2025 – so it is neither a new Roblox feature nor a campaign that has only just started. Its relevance lies in being a practical example of how brands should measure play experiences.
The brand became part of the game
Instead of sending Roblox players from the football game to a separate advertising page, Gamefam turned the existing FIFA Super Soccer into an Adidas world: the changing room, stadium and lobby received the brand look. Playable football boots, shirts and avatar items made the products usable within the game. Players could unlock rewards for goals and assists.
According to the official Gamefam case study, 14 Adidas partner clubs were involved – including Union Berlin, Boca Juniors and Al Nassr. An existing Discord community was also addressed. The mechanic thus combined repetition within the game, virtual products and community communication, rather than displaying an isolated banner ad.
51 million sessions are not 51 million people
For the four weeks, Gamefam reports more than 51 million gameplay sessions and over 480 million minutes of brand engagement. A session represents one play instance; the same person can be counted several times. Minutes are also not reach and not a purchase action.
The Digiday report on the award, by contrast, uses 51 million visits and 468 million brand interactions. Minutes, visits and interactions are different metrics; no publicly available methodology that converts these datasets into one another has been published here. The figures also come from an awarded campaign or its case study, not from an independent sales measurement.
Neither the number of unique people reached nor additional sales of Adidas products is substantiated by these figures. This gap is decisive when gaming campaigns compete with classic social advertising for budgets.
When a gaming experience is commercially successful
For comparable projects, brands should distinguish before launch between reach, participation, impact and business results. Possible measurement points include unique participants, recurring sessions, the share of completed challenges, brand awareness against a control group and – where it can be attributed in a privacy-compliant way – additional sales.
A counterexample to the mere session count is provided by Panda Express's gaming advertising: there a brand lift effect was reported, while sales likewise remained open. Warner Bros. also relies on existing Roblox games rather than only a new brand island. With e.l.f. and ZEPETO, in turn, virtual looks and identity are the focus.
Advertising to young audiences needs its own controls
For new implementations in 2026, the Roblox rules for ad integrations also apply: paid brand integrations must be labelled and reviewed under the relevant rules. Age limits and advertising rules are not a side issue on a platform with many minors. This does not allow a retrospective judgement on the 2025 Adidas campaign.
The festival shows how much visible usage a well-known game can generate for a brand. For German marketing teams, however, the price alone is not the decisive factor; what matters is what share of attention leads to measurable brand impact or additional demand.
Image: Gamefam / Adidas, official artwork for the Adidas Football Festival.