This morning, a warm and sunny day in Chicago, somebody at the Chicago Tribune noticed a commercial being filmed in the middle of the very busy downtown, replete with fake snow. Being that the Chicago Tribune is a newspaper that covers the goings on in Chicago, an assignment editor sent a photographer to get a few snaps of the unusual scene.
When the photographer arrived, he realized that the event—in the middle of downtown in a city of nearly three million people—was actually an Adidas photo shoot. No matter, he tried to get his shots, but encountered a hostile crew:
However, moments after I started photographing I was spotted by a member of the crew who crossed the street to confront me.
He explained that these new Adidas running shoes weren’t launched yet, and therefore I couldn’t be taking photographs.
This doesn’t make any logical sense, of course. Whether or not the shoes have launched yet has no bearing on whether a member of the press is allowed to take photographs of an event occurring in the most public of public places. (Hint: They are.) Following the spurious logic, other crew members physically threatened the photographer, and went so far as to make what I think is a very weak death threat:
As I tried to take another photograph, a woman from the crew grabbed my camera and tried to block me from photographing the model wearing the Adidas shoes. As I tried to move away from her the man with a fake snow machine on his back told me if he wasn’t working right now that that he’d “take care” of me, whatever that means, before pointing his fake snow gun at my camera and spraying me.
So what are these shoes that Adidas is trying so desperately to prevent from being seen while shooting a commercial in literally one of the most crowded places in the country? These:
Hmm, let’s get closer.
Still can’t really see them.
Can we get a little bit closer?
Great, now we’ve all seen Adidas’s dumb shoes. This better not have been an ingenious viral marketing gag.