BE LIKE MIKE: NIKE JORDAN CAMPAIGN
HOW TO BE FAMOUS
Micheal Jordan’s, “Beyond’ campaign. Adweek shares, Jordan Brand Aims to Inspire Young Athletes to Go 'Beyond' Adversity.
By Lexie Alcon Chaudhuri
The hardest part of the How to Be Famous process is easily the most important, and it’s your culture.
Great cultures beget great campaigns, from the client to the agency through and through. Sometimes, recognition and great press can be achieved from an amazing campaign, but this is just a flash of brilliance and culture is the only thing that keeps these flashes coming.
Great creative is more than just a cool idea, brand equity, and a big budget.
The Jordan Brand is well and strong as its namesake, Michael Jordan is set to turn 60 this year. No doubt you’ve seen previews for the upcoming movie that unites Matt Damon and Ben Afleck, Air. On the surface, it seems like a no-brainer that the latest Jordan campaign has caché and is getting earned media attention. However, look below the surface and the “Beyond” campaign tells a larger story about not only the Jordan brand, but also Nike and the creative team at Uncommon Creative Studio that brought it to light. Sure, it's easy to get attention when you have celebrity names to throw around or a large budget, but sometimes even the biggest brands don’t get attention for their creative campaigns because the campaign is just one aspect of the whole story.
Great campaigns are a true reflection of a brand’s ethos, the creativity behind it and the authenticity of the story.
To celebrate Jordan’s 60th birthday, the Jordan brand is giving away $2.3 million community grant awards, which inherently makes the “Beyond” campaign more newsworthy. They also aligned the debut of “Beyond” with the NBA All-Star weekend, which is well known to be a game for the fans. In the spot, a young girl discovers basketball in flashbacks to pivotal moments in her life that led to her achievement of playing college basketball and donning the new Jordans. This spot was developed by female-founded Uncommon Creative Studio, which just made AdAge’s A-list for International Agency of the Year. The ethos of Uncommon Creative? It basically puts a middle finger up to the majority of the ad industry as it stands today. Ultimately, it’s easy to connect the dots that Uncommon Creative was chosen by the business decision makers at Nike because both share common values.
Don’t just talk about diversity initiatives. Be about it.
While Nike faced backlash in light of the “Me Too” movement, it has made a clear commitment to improving its company culture and hiring and promoting more women into leadership positions. Nike highlighted this commitment to diversity and inclusion in its FY ‘21 Global Impact report with a ”2025 target of 50% representation of women in the global corporate workforce and 45% in leadership positions, and 35% representation of racial and ethnic minorities in the US corporate workforce.” With two years to go, six of Nike’s global leaders are female and heading up the company’s transformation.
Align your values with the type of client you want to work with. And be humble.
With chatter around a recession and the changing nature of the advertising industry to ebb and flow with hires and fires based on whether clients are tightening their purse strings, take a stand and choose to work with brands and clients that align with your values. I think every leader comes to a point when they have to choose between trusting the values they’ve laid out for their company to find projects and clients that align, or doing meaningless, soul-killing work for the sake of the paycheck. Where is your line in the sand? And if it’s the latter, don’t expect to get earned media coverage for the work you’re able to produce. Be okay with this and recognize the difference between going out on a limb and working with innovative clients, and working with clients that keep the light bulbs on.
As PR practitioners we appreciate when you bring us into the conversation early on as you strategize the campaign.
It’s so much harder once the creative has been approved by the client, because PR may have been viewed as a tactical execution point in the process. Earned media is earned because it takes a lot of effort to make a whole, complete story worth telling from the get-go. Great campaigns have the ability to be true not only to the brand, but also to the agency and its partners. After all, It's hard to lose a client or sale built on a foundation of trust. And strong foundations of trust rely on pretty awesome cultures where everyone feels seen, heard and respected.