What would the Super Bowl — let alone sports marketing in general — be like without the contributions from Nike? For the last 20+ years, the brand has set then shattered the template for commercial creation, in turn building an empire and influencing competitors and advertisers alike. Of course, half of the credit can be given to Dan Wieden and David Kennedy, who actually built their eponymous, Portland, Ore.-based agency at the suggestion of Nike chief Phil Knight in 1982 and eventually built it into a global network of their own.
The brand and agency fittingly grew together in the ’80s, but it took a certain basketball player sporting the #23 for Nike to truly explode. Arguably no single athlete proved more marketable during the ’80s and ’90s than Michael Jordan, who donned his first pair of Nike Air Jordans in 1984 and has since become a logo and brand himself. Magical playing skills aside, Jordan’s commercials broadened Nike’s reach and paved the way for the brand to lure several high-profile athletes in the ensuing years in every sport from basketball and football to tennis and golf.
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“Nike has been one of those brands that worked out that it’s better to influence culture than simply reflect it,” says Gareth Kay, director of digital strategy at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the agency of record for the NBA. “And that has huge impact on what you think about trying to create. More than any other brand they have shown the way forward time and time again.” Here, we chronicle just a few of those iconic TV ads featuring the Swoosh.
Spike & Mike — “It’s Gotta Be the Shoes”
| The campaign that arguably broke Spike Lee and solidified Michael Jordan as a household name was the brainchild of then-Wieden + Kennedy copywriter/creative director Jim Riswold, who conceived the idea of teaming up the pair after seeing Lee’s Air Jordan-obsessed character Mars Blackmon in She’s Gotta Have It. Riswold told The One Club in 2003: “It all came together pretty easily. Spike was a huge Jordan fan and he was not yet Spike Lee — he was a guy that answered his own phone. And so we made a phone call here and there, and three months later, we were shooting. I think the Spike and Mike stuff helped introduce Nike to popular culture and set a blueprint for a lot of what came after that.” The dynamic duo would end up shooting 17 “Spike & Mike” ads in all, the last of which came after a lengthy hiatus in 2003, which was Jordan’s last year in the NBA. Director Jason Zada from production company Tool of North America says, “[These] spots using two huge icons of the time were funny, progressive and really stood out. I vividly remember [them].” |
Bo Knows — “Bo Knows Diddley”
| Once again the creation of W+K’s Jim Riswold, the “Bo Knows” campaign starring pro football/pro baseball player Bo Jackson debuted in 1989 with “Bo Knows Diddley”. The idea was to capitalize on Bo’s dual talents, so Nike invited a variety of major athletes from Wayne Gretzky to John McEnroe to tout how Bo knows their sport, with legendary bluesman Bo Diddley himself making an appearance at the end. The ads won One Show and Clio awards, with Nike itself telling the New York Times in 1990 that the Bo Jackson commercials helped make the company No. 1 in its market. In 2008, “Bo Knows Diddley” was called “one of the greatest commercial campaigns ever created” by interactive magazine Zimbio. |
Penny Hardaway — Li’l Penny
| Just as Chris Rock was bringing the pain and breaking through via his stand-up comedy special in 1996, he simultaneously voiced Li’l ‘Penny, the wisecracking puppet that served as the sidekick to then-Orlando Magic superstar Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway in a campaign to promote his Air Penny shoe line. With a penchant for trash talk, Li’l Penny blew up just as Hardaway was peaking in the NBA, resulting in a series of ads that ran from the mid-to-late ’90s, crossover cameos on ESPN, music video appearances and even a retrospective called Knee High and Livin’ Large: The World According to Me. While, Wieden + Kennedy has revived the puppet-driven formula to some degree of success with the recent Kobe/LeBron “MVP” campaign, it seems to lack the hops, heart and humor of its predecessor (“It’ll never be as good as Li’l Penny,” says one commenter on Adweek‘s review of an “MVP” spot). “Li’l Penny was awesome,” Firstborn CEO Michael Ferdman adds. “All of those [ads] were great, especially this one with a great line, ‘You guys remind me of my shoe collection: one penny and a bunch of losers.'” |
Tiger Woods — “Ball Bouncing Trick”
“If You Let Me Play”
| Going against the grain in an arena dominated by males, Wieden + Kennedy took a bold step in 1995 with its “If You Let Me” spot, which featured adolescent girls spouting if-then scenarios that were tethered to the idea of inclusion into sports. In their 2006 study Selling Truth: How Nike’s Advertising to Women Claimed a Contested Reality, authors Jean M. Grow and Joyce M. Wolburg tracked the evolution of the brand’s three “big ideas” for marketing to women in the ’90s: entitlement, empowerment, and product emphasis. Some feminists argued that the ad victimized rather than empowered the girls and questioned Nike’s profit motives with what was basically a PSA. However, Janet Champ, W+K’s chief copywriter on the campaign, told the Selling Truth authors that the message was pure. “It wasn’t advertising. It was truth. We weren’t selling a damn thing. Just the truth. And behind the truth, of course, the message was brought to you by Nike.” Even those working for competitors are still affected by the spot, including Marcus Glover, who was the creator of Reebok’s “Terry Tate: Office Linebacker” effort. “[It] was an anthem for girls (and boys) which has helped to fuel the numbers of girls who play sports, many who have enjoyed professional careers as adults. I credit Nike for work which helped to change perceptions of women in sports and women in general. Nike is the brand who should be credited for creating a voice of empowerment for women athletes. Their platform helped to acknowledge that women could be world-class athletes as well as mothers, daughters, wives and sisters.” |
LaDainian Tomlinson and Troy Polamalu — “Fate”
| Aided by a brooding trip-hop remix of Ennio Morricone’s “L’estasi Dell’oro”, director David Fincher, he of Seven and Fight Club fame, helmed this spot in 2008 that shows how two gridiron greats — San Diego Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson and Pittsburgh Steelers defensive everyman Troy Polamalu — were destined to clash from birth. Documenting a life-long journey of the frenetic twosome, “Fate” not only earned raves from film sites like IonCinema.com — which said that it “merges a beautiful mix of slow motion visuals with a fluid musical score” — but was awarded a Cannes Silver Lion for Film in 2009. More importantly, it served as an example of how the lines between feature films and commercials have blurred and also paved the way for Fincher to do a follow-up for Nike Football last year called “Trail of Destruction (Alter Ego).” |
Kiran Aditham is an editor at AgencySpy.
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