Nike targeted Islamophobia, Homophobia, Gender equality, Racism, and the Black Lives Matter movement in their 2020 ad campaign.
When it comes to marketing, Nike knows how to do make a buzz in the virtual market…Maybe something more than a buzz. Recently, NIKE launched a visually stunning ad campaign called “You can’t stop sport/Us”
Apart from some seriously amazing editing done by the brand, which took almost 4000 hours of sports footage, to give birth to this creative genius, but the way they presented so many serious issues in just one minute and 30 seconds is just mind-blowing.
Nike targeted Islamophobia, Homophobia, Gender equality, Racism, and the Black Lives Matter movement among the rest. With calming instrumental music in the background, synced with the voice of a girl, dropping some serious motivational talk into the ad, mixed with the amazing and smoothest transition editing done by the creative team, Nike, in just 1 minute and 30 seconds, covered the whole 2020 and put out this idea that nothing can stop the spirit of sports, which they represented by showing how almost all the outdoor games were being played indoors and people were having the same fun as before.
They even showed their most controversial campaign character, Collin Kaepernick, taking the knee to show support for George Floyd, which then transitioned to some soccer players supporting the BLM movement.
Even though the campaign turned to be very impactful, just like most of their other campaign but the audience managed to find something to get angry about. In one instance in the video, the ad shows a Muslim girl skateboarding while wearing a niqab (a veil that covers the entire body from the top of the head to the ground, with only a mesh screen allowing the wearer to see in front of her) and then suddenly transitioning to a woman skateboarding while flagging the LGBTQ+ colors in the form of smoke.
This particular “clip” angered a lot of people from the Islamic religion as they thought this scene did not make any sense. Adding the fuel to this, the voice in this clip said “If we can’t fit the sport, we change it”. Now Nike doesn’t clearly mention what change do they exactly mean here, does it mean to change the sport just because you don’t fit it, or does it say to change the way you think to conform to the modern standards, or does it just randomly try to connect Islam with LGBTQ+ community, which does not make any sense as there is no context? Also, people started bashing the brand for being a hypocrite as very recently Nike was accused of getting supplies from Chinese factories that uses Uighur Muslims to work there, forcefully.
Looking aside from these critiques and allegations, Nike did an incredible job in this marketing masterpiece and has again raised the bar which they keep on doing, a campaign at a time.