Adidas Blends Surreal, Satisfying Art and ASMR in a 12-Hour Video Starring Its New Shoe

The video, on a channel titled “ZXience Network” features a stream of “oddly satisfying” ASMR-like clips that have only the trainer in common. It was created by Johannes Leonardo, which was named Adweek’s Breakthrough Agency of the Year for 2019, to tap into trend for surreal, absurd and “oddly satisfying” content online that “stimulates the senses” and is both soothing and bizarre.

The stream features a series of strange videos, including of a woman painting her face in the style of the shoe, and of a shoe being stretched out as if it were made of some sort of gum-like substance. Adidas said on the YouTube page the clips “feel too good to explain” and are designed to”mesmerize the senses.”

It’s not the first foray into internet culture for the brand. In August, Adidas in the U.K jumped on the “everything is cake meme” with a hyper-realistic sneaker made out of cake (in recent months, social media has been flooded with images and videos of cakes convincingly designed to look like other objects.)

The shoe shaped chocolate cakes were made to look exactly like pairs of Adidas Originals ZX 2K Boost sneakers and were created using chocolate ganache-coated sponge cake, yellow buttercream and orange flavor. A different pair of cake sneakers make an appearance in the “ZXience Network” stream.

Here’s the full 12-hour video:

An itch you didn’t know you had

Ray Smiling, creative director at Johannes Leonardo, said the stream was designed to be “intriguing, soothing, a bit confusing, and a little chaotic.”

“This is 100% all the things they tell you not to do in ad school,” he said. “It’s ‘slow TV’ taken to the Nth degree, taking learnings from often trafficked subReddits and applying them to a squishy shoe. You could totally have the ZXN on a second screen while you work during the day, or you could watch it at 2 a.m. to quiet your mind. Either way, watching the ZX squish random objects under the power of a hydraulic press, scratches an itch you may not have known you had.”