It’s January 2020 and we’re about to release Verona...
( 2 min read )
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Nike x Footlocker
Air Max Day 2020
↯
calendar.
Air Max Day 2020
↯
Since
2014 Nike has claimed the date of
March 26th
as Air Max Day. It’s an annual celebration of the tech that changed the shape of
sports
shoe design forever and has become a pretty big day in Nike’s
creative
calendar.
So we’ve been working for a few months on this great campaign around the theme of the future generation of culture-shapers. It’s going to be the springboard for the launch of the Air Max Verona and Nike’s AM2020, kicking off on Air Max Day 2020, and has been a long time in the making. It’s a lovingly-crafted piece that really gets into the soul of the next generation of talent. We’ve got a clever campaign line
‘The Future is in the Air’
and two (out of a planned eight) films in the bag – one about aspiring musicianBree Runway
and another about London stylistRhiannon Barry
.
Our next stop was Barcelona to shoot a kickabout with up-and-coming footballer Ansu Fati and football-obsessed musician La Tiguerita.
The problem is that it’s January 2020. And the newspapers are filling up with stories about something that sounds too eerily close to Verona for comfort. And this nasty virus 🦠😷🦠😷🦠 they’re all talking about seems to be an air-borne problem.
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The problem is that it’s January 2020. And the newspapers are filling up with stories about something that sounds too eerily close to Verona for comfort. And this nasty virus 🦠😷🦠😷🦠 they’re all talking about seems to be an air-borne problem.
OK... Time for a
serious
pivot.
We (quite literally) had to pull something
new
out of the air. And
fast
.
It’s part of the art of creative management to be able to think in a flexible and responsive way. Briefs sometimes change, budgets get knocked, timelines squeezed and meetings pushed. That’s all par for the course. Any sane commercial planning (particularly for landmark marketing milestones) includes a degree of contingency around potential pitfalls, as a business-as-usual baseline of due diligence. But the monumental gale-force-10 level of turbulence that hit us all in 2020 was just something that we could not have possibly seen coming. In seas as rough as this, even the cruise liners of the business world have to do a nimble turn, hoist up the John B’s sail and pull out a whole arsenal of new tools and tactics to navigate through with grace.
With all our fleet of cultural influencers now at home in lock down, we faced into the wind to create a new ‘Isolation Tactical’ approach. On the surface, it was just a simple call to some light-hearted community fun and movement (to be shared across all the socials): each of the influencers extending Air Max-inspired playful challenges out to their own networks of friends and followers. ‘How many Air Maxes can you balance on one foot?’ asked Kailem. ‘How high can you jump in your AIRS?’ was the invitation from a grinning Joel from Cheeky Sport.
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Everything was shot on the influencers’ own phones, at home. It was a new kind of rough-and-raw for Nike. And it worked a treat. The emojis flew and the feeling of fun and camaraderie in people’s responses, share, likes, loves gave us more than just the fuzzy-glow-reward of a campaign well-executed.
With all our fleet of cultural influencers now at home in lock down, we faced into the wind to create a new ‘Isolation Tactical’ approach. On the surface, it was just a simple call to some light-hearted community fun and movement (to be shared across all the socials): each of the influencers extending Air Max-inspired playful challenges out to their own networks of friends and followers. ‘How many Air Maxes can you balance on one foot?’ asked Kailem. ‘How high can you jump in your AIRS?’ was the invitation from a grinning Joel from Cheeky Sport.
Everything was shot on the influencers’ own phones, at home. It was a new kind of rough-and-raw for Nike. And it worked a treat. The emojis flew and the feeling of fun and camaraderie in people’s responses, share, likes, loves gave us more than just the fuzzy-glow-reward of a campaign well-executed.
Underneath it all, here was Nike putting out an uplifting (business as usual) message of solidarity to it’s influencer-partner-creators and a lets-all-take-this-in-our-stride message of energised positivity – keep moving, keep just doing it – to the wider world in the midst of this moment of dark, fear-inducing crisis. This warm hug of a campaign was more than just a casual dialogue. Nike was able to show up in a natural and tangible way in people’s lockdown lives. What had initially threatened to turn into a ship-wreck of a project became a bit of a life-raft message from Nike to its fans: we get it – we’re all in the same boat. Let’s have a bit of fun, whilst we’re at it.
