Drone Show by Adidas: Digital Listening Analysis

How did an Adidas drone show near the Acropolis of Athens cause thousands of reactions in only a couple of hours? Clip News’ team uses the Brandwatch platform to present a digital listening analysis. From top hashtags to total sentiment, the following case study shows how new-generation monitoring is turned into a communication strategy tool.  

Public outcry for the Drone Show

The recent Adidas drone show that took place at Zappeion Hall caused public outcry. The spectacular show, which included the hologram of a huge Adidas shoe with the Acropolis monument in the background, raised serious questions about whether commercial advertisements near historical locations are proper.

Politicians and supporters of Greece’s cultural heritage denounced the Adidas drone show as a blatant commercialization of the Greek cultural identity. At the same time, reactions flooded social media. Some users mocked the situation, while other expressed serious concerns over the impact of Acropolis’ commercial exploitation. The dispute led to an investigation by the Athens First Instance Prosecutor’s Office and to lawsuits by the Greek Ministry of Culture against any other person liable. On their side, the organizers of the event claim that all legal procedures were followed.

Key Takeaways

Clip News analysts studied 13,090 publicity references from Websites, Blogs and various Social Media channels over the period 15-19 May 2025. Public discussion focused on the commercialization of cultural heritage, with 4,994 unique authors expressing intense opinions, from condemnation to humorous comments.
The trending topics include phrases like “Adidas over the Acropolis” and “Adidas ad at Acropolis”. Online news was dominated by the statements of the Greek Minister of Culture, Lina Mendoni, and articles of cultural and political content..

Volume over Time

Publicity skyrocketed on 16 May 2025, one day after the drone show. Volume exceeded 600 references per hour and buzz stayed quite high until 18 May, proof of the intensity and duration of the reaction in the digital environment.  

Keywords, Hashtags & Emojis

The word cloud flooded with phrases like “lawsuits against any other person liable”, “prosecutor intervention”, “explanations in writing”, “Adidas shoe”. Top hashtags were #adidas, #acropolis και #mendoni. The emojis used were of particular interest. The dominant one was 🤡, suggesting irony, criticism and the surge of user emotions.

Media Sources

Out of the publicity sources selected for analysis, 76% of references came from X (formerly Twitter), 21% came from news websites, 2% from Facebook, 1% from Reddit and less than 1% from blogs. As far as the X references are concerned, 55% of the users were men and 45% of the users were women, a sign of broad demographic participation in the discussion.  

Sentiment Analysis

Some 48% of the references were negative and 52% of the references were neutral. No positive references were recorded, which proves that the entire situation mostly raised concerns.
 

Top Sites and Top X Posters

The websites with the biggest influence, based on the Impact* index, were “protothema.gr”, “iefimerida.gr”, “news247.gr”. In terms of X accounts, “grok” and “skaigr”, as well as journalists “NChatzinikolaou” and “KostasVaxevanis”, had the biggest impact, based on their numbers of followers.*Impact: It is a metric the potential impact of an author, site or mention. It is a logarithmic scale between 0-100 and depicts how “important” something is. ​  

Why Digital Listening matters

The Adidas Drone Show case highlights the importance of digital listening and real-time monitoring. Through advanced social media monitoring and internet monitoring tools, like Brandwatch, brands from every sector, culture and communication officials in this particular case, are able to:

• locate trends and crises at their onset
• analyze sentiment (positive, neutral, negative) and the origin of the discussion
• evaluate data for strategic reactions and repositioning.

For organizations that handle reputation or brand image issues, real-time media monitoring and the analysis of publicity data from different sources are necessary tools in contemporary communication strategy.  

Analysis identity

Digital Listening Tool: Brandwatch
Date Range: 15-19/05/2025
Sources: websites, blogs, forums, social media (subject to the limitations of each channel)
Keywording/Analysis: Clip News 

Search Restrictions

The Brandwatch platform collects data from websites, blogs, forums, social media (X, Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, etc.) with the restrictions defined by each channel. For example, discussions in closed forums or Facebook private groups are not collected.  

The above analysis provides an indicative approach, taking into account that varying the publicity data sample and time range may produce different insights.