Nike Removes Ad and Hits Rock Bottom
Nike removed this ad after uproar over “pace shaming” lol. Let me explain why this is so uniquely ironic.
Nike began in running. Phil Knight’s Blue Ribbon Sports was an importer of Onitsuka running shoes from Japan. In the early 1960s, running as exercise was a small niche sport. There were really only two running shoe companies in existence, Onitsuka and Adidas. Knight was more or less responsible for seeding the category in the US.
It started making its own shoes as Nike in 1971, and line go way up for the next half century as personal exercise became a central part of American life. It wasn’t until Michael Jordan took a huge chance on Nike’s fledgling basketball division that they became known as a household brand.
Right around this exact same time, the late 1980s, Nike launched their “Just Do It” campaign, arguably the greatest ad campaign of all time. The first ad featured marathon runner Walt Stack. It was about the mentality of an elite athlete: never allowing doubt or tiredness to stop your performance. Like all great ad campaigns, it made customers feel like if they bought the product, they could tap into that feeling of the uncompromising refusal to make excuses. To always show up.
It became definitional as an American and because this is a distinctly American notion. Meritocracy is part of who we are. We believe that if you work hard, you will succeed. We love tenacity. It’s why we took over the world. And no force greater than Nike and its ads helped foster that dominance worldwide.
The Just Do It campaign was created by Nike’s Portland ad agency Wieden + Kennedy which is still, 35 years later, regarded as the best in the world because of it. The quality of ads has plummeted through the floor, but Weiden’s history of greatness has made it still one of the only shops that makes cool and creative campaigns. This is because, like their client Nike, pursuing greatness with extreme tenacity is in their blood.
And that brings us to the woke era. Wieden, like every other agency, was absolutely demolished by the overeducated, brainwashed marketing majors who brought in the woke revolution. The values of these people, identity based justice warriors, was of course completely 180 contrary to those of Wieden and Nike. But, being extremely good at their jobs, Wieden did their best to blend the two. This is why they released the Kaepernik “believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything” campaign, because it attempts to make activism into the same sort of no-excuses pursuit of excellence as athletics.
But of course lefty activism particularly the woke variety runs on completely opposite values. It’s about grievances and unfairness, and about elevating the unsung beauty of the ugly, weak, and downtrodden. It’s about saying that an obese person is just as beautiful as someone who works on their bodies every day—because the latter is in fact just a recipient of privilege. Thus, the Kaepernick campaign did nothing to sell shoes.
Nike’s trajectory was heading heavily downwards, in large part because of these conflicts and because they’d abandoned their running category, which Ive written about elsewhere. In this period of confusion, Nike and Wieden decided to “get back to their roots” and release a campaign about being winners. This was their whole “winning isn’t for everyone” campaign which featured Willem Dafoe voiceover describing how being a winner at all costs might make him a bad person, but he doesn’t care. They also released a “you can’t win, so win” campaign, delivering a basically identical message. Hugely ironic because in a way, they were saying TO THEMSELVES that they shouldn’t listen to what anyone was saying about their campaigns…while simultaneously bowing to woke every step of the way. All of these new “winner” campaigns depict, of course, a perfectly diverse array of your standard top athletes interspersed with various wheelchair fencers and fat black yoga badasses.
And this brings us to this, the final coup de grâce which I believe should signal to Nike that its internal culture is simply unsalvageable in its current form. They finally get up the balls to actually stand for their old values, in their original category of running, throwing a little bit of funny shade at marathon walkers. A valiant, genuine attempt to save the soul of the company, as its share price has plummeted in recent years without any signs of recovery, BUT, sadly, they couldn’t even stand behind it. They immediately caved to the communists, because they are infected by communists, and they have taken over. “Pace shaming.” The end of Nike as we knew it.
https://thecarousel.substack.com/p/nike-pace-shamed-removes-ad-and-hits