Nike now seems keen to reverse these decisions, too. The company said in its last earnings call that it would reinvest $1 billion in consumer-facing activities in fiscal 2025, including sports marketing, increased design resources, in-store activations and “bigger, bolder” brand campaigns.
Can Nike just do it?
To be sure, Nike never completely abandoned brand marketing—its 2023 Women’s World Cup ads and a 2024 UEFA Euro spot are both recent examples.
But with the erosion of brand marketing resources, its big brand campaigns over the last few years weren’t integrated well across channels, Giunco said.
For instance, when it created online content targeting micro-communities with local influencers, such as a 2021 digital series about Berlin teenagers, Nike made Instagram posts but didn’t adequately push that creative across the digital ecosystem, Giunco observed. Soursop, the agency that created the Berlin series, declined to comment.
By contrast, Nike’s 2018 campaign “Nothing Beats a Londoner,” which was also for a local market, got much more support. It took 14 months to make the ad and drew from months of deep research, said Mark Shanley, former creative director at Nike’s agency Wieden+Kennedy London and now a CD at adam&eveDDB.
Nike’s top execs in Portland were initially reluctant to accept the ad, Shanley recalled. “It looked more like a music video for a London artist,” he said.
But they eventually did, and Nike supported it with a robust social media strategy. “Londoner” debuted across the Instagram channels of the more than 250 young athletes who appeared in the ad. After the launch, searches in London for Nike products reportedly went up by 93%, while U.K. searches increased by 54%.
That same year, Nike also built a famous campaign around former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who’d been blackballed by the NFL following his protesting police violence against Black communities. The campaign debuted first on Twitter (now called X), with a post on Kaepernick’s account.
