“Hey! Check out this Nike ad!” This was my entry point into a new world. I transferred dorms because a clerical quirk sent me to the “Substance Free” building...
Brilliant article. It left me wondering exactly why the new commercials SUCK SO MUCH.
It finally occurred to me that it's because even the people making them don't believe them. That's why they have to try so hard.
In the POV commercial, the "wouldn't you like to... score the winning goal / be the star / drive the car / get the glory" was understood and felt by everyone from the humble copywriter to the global co-stars of football who appear in it. We already felt and thought it, long before Nike ever made it into an ad.
Whereas... in the latest commercials, one after another, a series of young actors - studiously, laboriously diverse in terms of culture, color, looks, and body shape - stare at the camera and mouth words that they'd never thought to say before. This reoccurring "straight to the camera" technique isn't accidental. It's a copywriter's last-ditch attempt to make the highly doubtful seem credible, sending out the troop of young actors to demand: "Who ya gonna believe? Me or ya lyin' eyes?"
My one contribution to this is just to note that the org that's done the most for women's sports in the last decade is..... the remarkably unwoke UFC. First they helped make Ronda Rousey a star (reversing Dana White's insistence that women would never fight in the UFC)- now they've fully included the women's divisions and they regularly headline cards. While women's bantamweight is a godawful division, and flyweight isn't much better- the top 10 of women's 115 is, like, an actually good division. (Better than men's heavyweight or light heavyweight, frankly). Namajunas, Zhang, Andrade, however you spell Joanna's last name..... these fighters are incredibly good. The US-China rivalry between Namajunas and Zhang, the pre-fight nationalistic trashtalk, the crowd booing the Chinese fighter, Namajunas melting her with a headkick..... all great stuff.
Just funny how the least woke sports league actually created the most successful, popular women's sport
I don't know, are the new ads bad because of they're "woke" or bad because they're bad? I'm not sure on the male/female analysis when the ads you picked were just mediocre, separate from any feminist/etc discourse. Feel like it's more of a story about ad agencies getting worse at their job than a story about masculinity
They are bad because they're woke. Conformism isn't good for art. Normal people used to tune into the Super Bowl to see the ads, but I can't imagine anyone tuning in now.
Superbad was funny; Booksmart was a headscratcher. Vikings is a great-looking TV show with a lot of amazing battles, but we are supposed to believe that women—mothers and grandmothers, according to the plot in later seasons—were better at hand-to-hand combat, killing scores of the young men. It takes you out of the story.
Ad agencies are only as good as their clients demand them to be. Clearly, Nike executives demand lame content, and they get it. There's no reason to believe ad agencies suddenly became incompetent; the production values are as high as ever. The agencies are paid to create an unrecognizable world. The people in charge of the corporations are terrified of losing their jobs if a 23-year-old strikes a match.
Steve Jobs famously hired (and re-hired) Chiat/Day as Apple's ad agency, and he directed and oversaw their work. But most companies, especially now, aren't run by the CEO. The clerics are in charge. When I was at Apple (early aughts to mid-teens), the company was slowly, almost imperceptibly handed over to the Human Resources department. HR reps were present in every on-campus meeting. A simple question from a young manager trying to understand a commission plan (for example) could end his career. The HR reps sat in the back of the room buried in their screens. If they heard a comment they didn't like, they had a word with the ranking manager after the meeting and that was that.
That’s a lot of personal opinion and not much compelling analysis. The ad industry is also entirely unrecognizable from what it was in the 90s, with massive consolidations happening as the big four own everyone (reducing competition), TV ads having way less of an influence on consumer purchasing decisions, and with ad agency jobs being way less desirable for creative talent. Those factors IMO have a much bigger effect on the quality of any ads, more so than any societal attitudes that you describe.
That's bizarre personal opinion with no compelling analysis whatsoever. That he who pays the piper calls the tune is simple fact, yet you have that backasswards.
Yeah, this is just a list of your random prejudices. In particular, "conformism isn't good for art" - but the older ads were just as conformist. They just conformed to something you like, as opposed to something you don't like, so you apparently don't recognise it.
That said, I actually think this answer is correct. The ads are bad because they're woke, because wokeness is very unfocused, and that makes for a bad narrative. A good ad has to cram a whole narrative into a very short time. Winning is a really good narrative for an ad, because it's an easy story arc to hint at, and we'll take the hints, understand the story, feel the feels. Wokeness is complex and contradictory, and its ultimate goal is... equality, which is the world's greatest political principle, but quite unexciting to look at.
There must be good ways to make good woke ads, but they aren't a bunch of random people standing around going "woke is great!" any more than winner ads involve a bunch of blokes standing around going "winning is great!"
There's nothing complex about woke thought. The impulse to exert power by demonizing others is ancient and uncomplicated.
Ideologies that demand conformity don't create good art. There are no great works from the Soviet Union or the North Korean government or the KKK or Antifa. Great art comes from the people who survived or escaped these systems, not the people running them.
Art depends on things that are true. Shakespeare survives because he understood human nature and his characters act in ways that are recognizable to us today. He had an observant mind, not a tyrannical one. (Not a "random prejudice," by the way; many people have responded enthusiastically to Shakespeare's work.) There's nothing true or recognizably human in modern woke media.
That's arguable, but I personally think that equality is logically prior to liberty. It is precisely because we are all equal (in our humanity, in rights, etc.) that none of us should have power over others except with their consent.
But yeah, there are also good arguments for putting liberty first. I don't have any objection to that.
It wasn't obvious that the "created equal" version of equality was what was being referred to. It's not the most common usage, nor is it a very convincing formulation. Everyone is actually unequal in practically every respect.
The ad that immediately comes to mind when seeing these is that disastrous Gillette ad in which the company decided that the best way to sell razors was to tell its customers that they were crap and needed to do better.
My take is that these ads are produced by activists, led by women who decide that their role in running an ad campaign for a male-dominated brand is to preach to the audience and shape "better" behavior. The new Nike ads above show zero love or connection with sport - just an intention of taking it over because it's a heavily straight male space and that means it's Bad.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing the aftermath of this poor creative focus. There are plenty of athletic companies that are happy to focus on and cater to athletic men, and those companies will quickly snap up market share as Nike continues on its quest to make wNBA more popular than the NBA.
Disastrous? Hardly. Gillette's ad made perfect business sense. Men are going scruffy now—even Ted Cruz grew a beard—and they use electric trimmers, not razors. Meanwhile, most women still want to go hairless, and they've figured out by now that "lady razors" are a ripoff. Gillette's data tells them that an ever-increasing share of men's razor buyers are women. So they made an ad aimed at women, while pretending to target men who enjoy being scolded. But why bother to pretend? Because if they overtly advertised men's razors to women, they'd lose male customers who won't buy stuff that's "for a girl" and they'd cannibalize their lady razor sales to the women who haven't wised up yet. Controversy just creates free publicity, just like Pepsi's "disastrous" Kendall Jenner ad that was intended from the get-go to get pulled from TV and get free viral distribution instead. Ryan Holiday figured this out more than a decade ago at American Apparel and wrote a book about it.
Do you have sales data to back that up? I find your argument compelling but would be curious to see if it is backed by evidence of improved sales for Gillette.
I just don't know about all that feminist messaging there. It just feels like the issue is that it's bland and uninspiring. Doesn't really seem connected to any activism or anything. The Kaepernick ads, IMO, were hugely compelling and still managed to tie love for sport in with the message. But that's because they were done well, would we be singing the same tone if they did a shitty job?
The Kaepernick ads more capitalized on a moment in time rather than generating their own moment. They were also offensively over the top, IMO. Take a tour of Arlington, or the American cemeteries in Normandy, or MLK's gravesite, and then look me in the eye and tell me Kaepernick sacrificed "everything," while being paid millions of dollars by a multinational corporation up to its eyeballs in China. Disgraceful.
They could have used any term and it would have been bad. I think we’re conflating poor execution with some indication or validation (lack thereof) of unrelated politics.
It was a terrifying ad: all those awful men grilling tasty food for their families and all of those rotten boys having fun. It gave me the heebie-jeebies and I couldn't go to work for three days.
I'm never convinced by any form of "social justice activism" that comes from huge companies like this. Not to mention...why are we expecting this from said corporations? We all know, deep down, it's not genuine, but then we excoriate them when they don't perform?
It's stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Also, I don't give a rip about sports much these days, but I like the cut of your jib. Good stuff here.
My dad got me a job as an apprentice pipefitter building a refinery. Someone wrote on the bathroom wall "Hey shoppie (my dad was shop steward), stop f*cking your boy in the ass, he's walking funny (I do walk kind of funny)." I thought it was mean-spirited, but not worth doing anything about. Now if someone did that at my office job they'd probably call the police, might even make the newspaper. Me personally I would much rather live in a world where people wrote homophobic slurs about me on the bathroom wall than one where all human interaction is reduced to banal small talk.
Reading this, I'm reminded of something I think you may have said in one of your nostalgia trips for the grandeur of the NBA on NBC presentation (as opposed to the plastic, fawning, social media driven, pseudo-fashion show that is NBA on ESPN): that executives must have the arrogance to, in a Steve Jobs like manner, give to the user enduring content that they want but don't know they want yet, as opposed to locally optimizing for engagement and being captive to Goodhart's law. It seems what you describe at Nike and the ad world is but a failed attempt that this very exhortation of yours: an elite attempt at shaping public discourse. Of course, this doesn't mean the spirit of your call for more commanding content is wrong, just that any such approach is likely to meet the occasional failure.
This masculinity angle (or feminization if we are to work in Tyler Cowen's framework) describes the process by which the content production is evolving but it doesn't quite (or only partially) explains the consumers' lack of enthusiasm for it. This could very well be a point about the "culture wars" at large, but much of the resistance to this is an impatience for hypocrisy of a corporation like Nike hectoring down to them. In my social circle that ranges from effete academics to the high-T (naturally or otherwise ;-P) meatheads at the local gym, there is near universal disdain for such content and the manliness (or lack thereof) of it doesn't feature among reasons. To be fair, you do cover this, but your point of emphasis remains on the gendered nature of it all. Many of the same points could be made -- potentially less eye catchingly -- by phrasing this in the sense of the content being devoid of the escapism, sense of adventure, danger, cavalier attitude that many Americans like to self-identify with, or more cynically, the sense of (deluded?) "fantasy" Bruno Macaes has characterized America with.
Excellent points raised. Anecdotally, none of my friends give a shit about manliness or any of that, it's more of a "silence, brand" attitude that prevails. My less elegant take wrt Ad industry is that we just have too much data. Back in the day, you can make those ads and base it off feel, which has its limitations. Now, there's so much data, and so many marketing orgs base everything off of that, that everything is about "optimization". It almost reminds me of the analytics vs eye test debate happening in the sport itself. It's very hard in the modern corporate environment to incentivize true risk-taking/innovation when you can so easily run some numbers and determine that something is "not working".
I think the data tsunami is definitely relevant to the undecided whale. While companies have long had data on the people they directly interact with, mainly those who bought their products, they now have a 10,000-foot view of the global market, and can see every potential whale - they went from a 1940s fishing dinghy to shooting harpoons from a Blackhawk with a next-gen fish finder. I see it as the cooperate side of some of the social issues we associate with the rise of social media and the new lens by which we all see wealth, success, sexual attraction, etc. once our perspective expands to the size of a global community.
I'm personally inclined to agree but could see valid arguments that suggest these are more generally American traits (if we are to simply compare average tendencies on these matters with those in other countries, as flawed as such attempts are doomed to be). In making my point, I should have made it clearer that it wasn't disagreement necessarily but rather a nudge toward a framing that is more likely to be "engaged" with (in the pre-internet sense) and less likely to be mired in the superficial, inattentive readings of culture warriors looking for bogeymen.
Not sure I agree with this whole idea of Nike going from great macho marketing to dumb woke messages. Nike is about great achievement, but they define achievement broadly, even inclusively, in ways that are often more about overcoming odds than being a top winner.
Looking back in the glory years of 90s Nike ads (which I agree were awesome), you'll find that one of the classic ads has girls saying "If you let me play" [1]. An even earlier ad, which launched the "Just Do It" tagline, is about an 80 year old man still running[2],
And while Michael Jordan is undoubtedly a hyper competitive guy with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, that's not the impression we got from the ads where we see him goof around with Spike Lee[3], talking inspirationally about his failures[4], goofing around with Bugs Bunny[5], and inspiring the next generation[6].
And MJ is far from the only spokesperson. Nike has had long relationships with Serena Williams, the US Women's Soccer Team (well before Megan Rapinoe) and other female athletes.
And while the Euro Cup ad you showed does in fact suck, the clearly "woke" campaign with Colin Kaepernick[6] is quite good as it talks about being great no matter who you are.
Going through these Nike ads was a lot of fun. Even if you don't agree, you should check out the ads if you haven't seen them in a while.
This Nike thing kind of reminds me of Victoria’s Secret cancelling their fashion show because it’s not “culturally relevant”. Since when is sex not culturally relevant?
Funny, tonight I laced up my Nikes and went to the low-quality tennis courts nearby and the motivating factor was imagining that maybe I could enter a local amateur tournament and WIN! And everyone would be like holy shit who is this 38-year-old prodigy?!
I did not find motivation to leave my house in the thought: imagine how proud my husband is that I, a 38-year-old mother of three, worked up a sweat for 45 minutes. WOW!!!
Part of the issue has been that Nike has gone from being sui-generis, _generative_ in terms of dictating the narrative to becoming _responsive_, to the latest controversy. The MJ ads were agenda setting, insouciant even, regal one might say? Recent ads, featuring Lebron, Kobe, Serena or Rapinoe, tend to be doubled down, almost insecure responses to caricatured straw men of each of these individuals' "adversaries" or "haters", whose voices have been amplified in a social-media driven content creation feedback loop.
Lebron caught flak for his free agency, and even some of his community work so there have been campaigns where he chose to wear the black hat (to respond to the Decision hate) or championing equality to not-so-subtly position himself as heir to Ali. Similarly, Kobe leaned into the ball-hog chucker reputation and challenged critics in one of his final ads (to good effect). Heck, the entire Black Mamba schtick was manufactured to cope with hate and pressure post Colorado. Rapinoe tends to get a lot of unfair shit for being public with her sexuality and the case on pay structure (details are contested here, and there was some degree of agency the women had, if I recall correctly) so the response has been for her to feature in ads where she and her team are further built up, not backing down.
So while there is a factor of the "creative" class within Nike pushing the woke angle but I think a non-trivial element is also the lack of creativity of this class leading to a default resort to reaction/response campaigns with the resultant steady state being woke content.
This is so, so good! Clarifies a lot of points I’ve been making - much less effectively - about Nike’s advertising, and raises others that I hadn’t really considered. (Personally, my favorite commercial series was the secret tournament spots during the 2002 World Cup with the remix of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation.”)
Watching the "Take it To the Next Level" ad gave me a glimpse into what my grandson loves about hockey, the game he has played passionately for the last 12 years, ever since he saw the sport at age 4. And I am ever so glad he is growing up in a solidly unwoke small city in the midwest, playing a sport that has so far resisted de-masculinization.
Feminist (and also “Woke”) advertisements fail because they’re preachy and, worse, inauthentic.
You quoted Charles Barkley, who explained it: the locker room is sexist, racist, homophobic etc. Are we to believe for a minute that the women’s locker rooms are any different? That women are so different?
Sure many women - many people - bristle at patriarchy, just as many people bristle at institutional racism…but it doesn’t mean these people are dorks. And yet they’re ceaselessly portrayed this way in the media. These ads are cringy not just because they’re lame, but because they don’t represent the truth. People are smarter than that. Whether they know it or not.
The fact that most major corporations are this dumb/anemic/cowardly/disingenuous (pick one or one of your own) isn’t surprising. I’d hope Nike, with their pedigree, would know better. But they don’t.
It’s pretty telling that the nasty soccer ball had a scrappy working class accent.
Great point.
Brilliant article. It left me wondering exactly why the new commercials SUCK SO MUCH.
It finally occurred to me that it's because even the people making them don't believe them. That's why they have to try so hard.
In the POV commercial, the "wouldn't you like to... score the winning goal / be the star / drive the car / get the glory" was understood and felt by everyone from the humble copywriter to the global co-stars of football who appear in it. We already felt and thought it, long before Nike ever made it into an ad.
Whereas... in the latest commercials, one after another, a series of young actors - studiously, laboriously diverse in terms of culture, color, looks, and body shape - stare at the camera and mouth words that they'd never thought to say before. This reoccurring "straight to the camera" technique isn't accidental. It's a copywriter's last-ditch attempt to make the highly doubtful seem credible, sending out the troop of young actors to demand: "Who ya gonna believe? Me or ya lyin' eyes?"
My one contribution to this is just to note that the org that's done the most for women's sports in the last decade is..... the remarkably unwoke UFC. First they helped make Ronda Rousey a star (reversing Dana White's insistence that women would never fight in the UFC)- now they've fully included the women's divisions and they regularly headline cards. While women's bantamweight is a godawful division, and flyweight isn't much better- the top 10 of women's 115 is, like, an actually good division. (Better than men's heavyweight or light heavyweight, frankly). Namajunas, Zhang, Andrade, however you spell Joanna's last name..... these fighters are incredibly good. The US-China rivalry between Namajunas and Zhang, the pre-fight nationalistic trashtalk, the crowd booing the Chinese fighter, Namajunas melting her with a headkick..... all great stuff.
Just funny how the least woke sports league actually created the most successful, popular women's sport
Women's golf is a similar story - seems to be reasonably viable and growing.
I don't know, are the new ads bad because of they're "woke" or bad because they're bad? I'm not sure on the male/female analysis when the ads you picked were just mediocre, separate from any feminist/etc discourse. Feel like it's more of a story about ad agencies getting worse at their job than a story about masculinity
They are bad because they're woke. Conformism isn't good for art. Normal people used to tune into the Super Bowl to see the ads, but I can't imagine anyone tuning in now.
Superbad was funny; Booksmart was a headscratcher. Vikings is a great-looking TV show with a lot of amazing battles, but we are supposed to believe that women—mothers and grandmothers, according to the plot in later seasons—were better at hand-to-hand combat, killing scores of the young men. It takes you out of the story.
Ad agencies are only as good as their clients demand them to be. Clearly, Nike executives demand lame content, and they get it. There's no reason to believe ad agencies suddenly became incompetent; the production values are as high as ever. The agencies are paid to create an unrecognizable world. The people in charge of the corporations are terrified of losing their jobs if a 23-year-old strikes a match.
Steve Jobs famously hired (and re-hired) Chiat/Day as Apple's ad agency, and he directed and oversaw their work. But most companies, especially now, aren't run by the CEO. The clerics are in charge. When I was at Apple (early aughts to mid-teens), the company was slowly, almost imperceptibly handed over to the Human Resources department. HR reps were present in every on-campus meeting. A simple question from a young manager trying to understand a commission plan (for example) could end his career. The HR reps sat in the back of the room buried in their screens. If they heard a comment they didn't like, they had a word with the ranking manager after the meeting and that was that.
That’s a lot of personal opinion and not much compelling analysis. The ad industry is also entirely unrecognizable from what it was in the 90s, with massive consolidations happening as the big four own everyone (reducing competition), TV ads having way less of an influence on consumer purchasing decisions, and with ad agency jobs being way less desirable for creative talent. Those factors IMO have a much bigger effect on the quality of any ads, more so than any societal attitudes that you describe.
That's bizarre personal opinion with no compelling analysis whatsoever. That he who pays the piper calls the tune is simple fact, yet you have that backasswards.
Yeah, this is just a list of your random prejudices. In particular, "conformism isn't good for art" - but the older ads were just as conformist. They just conformed to something you like, as opposed to something you don't like, so you apparently don't recognise it.
That said, I actually think this answer is correct. The ads are bad because they're woke, because wokeness is very unfocused, and that makes for a bad narrative. A good ad has to cram a whole narrative into a very short time. Winning is a really good narrative for an ad, because it's an easy story arc to hint at, and we'll take the hints, understand the story, feel the feels. Wokeness is complex and contradictory, and its ultimate goal is... equality, which is the world's greatest political principle, but quite unexciting to look at.
There must be good ways to make good woke ads, but they aren't a bunch of random people standing around going "woke is great!" any more than winner ads involve a bunch of blokes standing around going "winning is great!"
There's nothing complex about woke thought. The impulse to exert power by demonizing others is ancient and uncomplicated.
Ideologies that demand conformity don't create good art. There are no great works from the Soviet Union or the North Korean government or the KKK or Antifa. Great art comes from the people who survived or escaped these systems, not the people running them.
Art depends on things that are true. Shakespeare survives because he understood human nature and his characters act in ways that are recognizable to us today. He had an observant mind, not a tyrannical one. (Not a "random prejudice," by the way; many people have responded enthusiastically to Shakespeare's work.) There's nothing true or recognizably human in modern woke media.
"There's nothing true or recognizably human in modern woke media" maybe not to an old white guy
I hope this comment is ironic — because otherwise it is a perfect distillation of the utterly fatuous nature of woke discourse.
You vs that old white guy Shakespeare is not a contest,
Liberty, not equality, is the world's greatest political principle.
That's arguable, but I personally think that equality is logically prior to liberty. It is precisely because we are all equal (in our humanity, in rights, etc.) that none of us should have power over others except with their consent.
But yeah, there are also good arguments for putting liberty first. I don't have any objection to that.
It wasn't obvious that the "created equal" version of equality was what was being referred to. It's not the most common usage, nor is it a very convincing formulation. Everyone is actually unequal in practically every respect.
The ad that immediately comes to mind when seeing these is that disastrous Gillette ad in which the company decided that the best way to sell razors was to tell its customers that they were crap and needed to do better.
My take is that these ads are produced by activists, led by women who decide that their role in running an ad campaign for a male-dominated brand is to preach to the audience and shape "better" behavior. The new Nike ads above show zero love or connection with sport - just an intention of taking it over because it's a heavily straight male space and that means it's Bad.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing the aftermath of this poor creative focus. There are plenty of athletic companies that are happy to focus on and cater to athletic men, and those companies will quickly snap up market share as Nike continues on its quest to make wNBA more popular than the NBA.
Disastrous? Hardly. Gillette's ad made perfect business sense. Men are going scruffy now—even Ted Cruz grew a beard—and they use electric trimmers, not razors. Meanwhile, most women still want to go hairless, and they've figured out by now that "lady razors" are a ripoff. Gillette's data tells them that an ever-increasing share of men's razor buyers are women. So they made an ad aimed at women, while pretending to target men who enjoy being scolded. But why bother to pretend? Because if they overtly advertised men's razors to women, they'd lose male customers who won't buy stuff that's "for a girl" and they'd cannibalize their lady razor sales to the women who haven't wised up yet. Controversy just creates free publicity, just like Pepsi's "disastrous" Kendall Jenner ad that was intended from the get-go to get pulled from TV and get free viral distribution instead. Ryan Holiday figured this out more than a decade ago at American Apparel and wrote a book about it.
Do you have sales data to back that up? I find your argument compelling but would be curious to see if it is backed by evidence of improved sales for Gillette.
Men use electric trimmers, not razors? You've got market research backing that. I for one use a sturdy brand of disposable. Daily.
I just don't know about all that feminist messaging there. It just feels like the issue is that it's bland and uninspiring. Doesn't really seem connected to any activism or anything. The Kaepernick ads, IMO, were hugely compelling and still managed to tie love for sport in with the message. But that's because they were done well, would we be singing the same tone if they did a shitty job?
The Kaepernick ads more capitalized on a moment in time rather than generating their own moment. They were also offensively over the top, IMO. Take a tour of Arlington, or the American cemeteries in Normandy, or MLK's gravesite, and then look me in the eye and tell me Kaepernick sacrificed "everything," while being paid millions of dollars by a multinational corporation up to its eyeballs in China. Disgraceful.
They literally use the term patriarchy
They could have used any term and it would have been bad. I think we’re conflating poor execution with some indication or validation (lack thereof) of unrelated politics.
It was a terrifying ad: all those awful men grilling tasty food for their families and all of those rotten boys having fun. It gave me the heebie-jeebies and I couldn't go to work for three days.
Bud Lite
My son Ethan really used the word "zaftig" to politely call that young lady husky lmao. Only Ethan can pull words like that out of his ass 😂😂😂
lol. Ethan, did you pull zaftig out of the fleshy part of your thigh?
The part with the wound in it, yes
I'm never convinced by any form of "social justice activism" that comes from huge companies like this. Not to mention...why are we expecting this from said corporations? We all know, deep down, it's not genuine, but then we excoriate them when they don't perform?
It's stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Also, I don't give a rip about sports much these days, but I like the cut of your jib. Good stuff here.
If I can get the non sports people AND the sports people, that's the ultimate for me.
So you're going for the Undecided Whale also?
Everybody wants that irresistible whale
My dad got me a job as an apprentice pipefitter building a refinery. Someone wrote on the bathroom wall "Hey shoppie (my dad was shop steward), stop f*cking your boy in the ass, he's walking funny (I do walk kind of funny)." I thought it was mean-spirited, but not worth doing anything about. Now if someone did that at my office job they'd probably call the police, might even make the newspaper. Me personally I would much rather live in a world where people wrote homophobic slurs about me on the bathroom wall than one where all human interaction is reduced to banal small talk.
Brett - That may be because you're not actually gay.
I'm not sure if homophobic slur was the right term for intrafamily sexual abuse.
Reading this, I'm reminded of something I think you may have said in one of your nostalgia trips for the grandeur of the NBA on NBC presentation (as opposed to the plastic, fawning, social media driven, pseudo-fashion show that is NBA on ESPN): that executives must have the arrogance to, in a Steve Jobs like manner, give to the user enduring content that they want but don't know they want yet, as opposed to locally optimizing for engagement and being captive to Goodhart's law. It seems what you describe at Nike and the ad world is but a failed attempt that this very exhortation of yours: an elite attempt at shaping public discourse. Of course, this doesn't mean the spirit of your call for more commanding content is wrong, just that any such approach is likely to meet the occasional failure.
This masculinity angle (or feminization if we are to work in Tyler Cowen's framework) describes the process by which the content production is evolving but it doesn't quite (or only partially) explains the consumers' lack of enthusiasm for it. This could very well be a point about the "culture wars" at large, but much of the resistance to this is an impatience for hypocrisy of a corporation like Nike hectoring down to them. In my social circle that ranges from effete academics to the high-T (naturally or otherwise ;-P) meatheads at the local gym, there is near universal disdain for such content and the manliness (or lack thereof) of it doesn't feature among reasons. To be fair, you do cover this, but your point of emphasis remains on the gendered nature of it all. Many of the same points could be made -- potentially less eye catchingly -- by phrasing this in the sense of the content being devoid of the escapism, sense of adventure, danger, cavalier attitude that many Americans like to self-identify with, or more cynically, the sense of (deluded?) "fantasy" Bruno Macaes has characterized America with.
Excellent points raised. Anecdotally, none of my friends give a shit about manliness or any of that, it's more of a "silence, brand" attitude that prevails. My less elegant take wrt Ad industry is that we just have too much data. Back in the day, you can make those ads and base it off feel, which has its limitations. Now, there's so much data, and so many marketing orgs base everything off of that, that everything is about "optimization". It almost reminds me of the analytics vs eye test debate happening in the sport itself. It's very hard in the modern corporate environment to incentivize true risk-taking/innovation when you can so easily run some numbers and determine that something is "not working".
I think the data tsunami is definitely relevant to the undecided whale. While companies have long had data on the people they directly interact with, mainly those who bought their products, they now have a 10,000-foot view of the global market, and can see every potential whale - they went from a 1940s fishing dinghy to shooting harpoons from a Blackhawk with a next-gen fish finder. I see it as the cooperate side of some of the social issues we associate with the rise of social media and the new lens by which we all see wealth, success, sexual attraction, etc. once our perspective expands to the size of a global community.
I'm personally inclined to agree but could see valid arguments that suggest these are more generally American traits (if we are to simply compare average tendencies on these matters with those in other countries, as flawed as such attempts are doomed to be). In making my point, I should have made it clearer that it wasn't disagreement necessarily but rather a nudge toward a framing that is more likely to be "engaged" with (in the pre-internet sense) and less likely to be mired in the superficial, inattentive readings of culture warriors looking for bogeymen.
Not sure I agree with this whole idea of Nike going from great macho marketing to dumb woke messages. Nike is about great achievement, but they define achievement broadly, even inclusively, in ways that are often more about overcoming odds than being a top winner.
Looking back in the glory years of 90s Nike ads (which I agree were awesome), you'll find that one of the classic ads has girls saying "If you let me play" [1]. An even earlier ad, which launched the "Just Do It" tagline, is about an 80 year old man still running[2],
And while Michael Jordan is undoubtedly a hyper competitive guy with a bit of a chip on his shoulder, that's not the impression we got from the ads where we see him goof around with Spike Lee[3], talking inspirationally about his failures[4], goofing around with Bugs Bunny[5], and inspiring the next generation[6].
And MJ is far from the only spokesperson. Nike has had long relationships with Serena Williams, the US Women's Soccer Team (well before Megan Rapinoe) and other female athletes.
And while the Euro Cup ad you showed does in fact suck, the clearly "woke" campaign with Colin Kaepernick[6] is quite good as it talks about being great no matter who you are.
Going through these Nike ads was a lot of fun. Even if you don't agree, you should check out the ads if you haven't seen them in a while.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ_XSHpIbZE
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_xozTo6wrU
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vH4w_DxM8U
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mMioJ5szc
[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBOVS_oFEeY
[6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8HCi159dN0
[6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyHI3IrJOR8
This Nike thing kind of reminds me of Victoria’s Secret cancelling their fashion show because it’s not “culturally relevant”. Since when is sex not culturally relevant?
Subscribing via Blocked and Reported...my husband will enjoy this, I think!
Same! Came over via Blocked and Reported as well.
Hey hey BARPod team
Brilliant analysis.
Funny, tonight I laced up my Nikes and went to the low-quality tennis courts nearby and the motivating factor was imagining that maybe I could enter a local amateur tournament and WIN! And everyone would be like holy shit who is this 38-year-old prodigy?!
I did not find motivation to leave my house in the thought: imagine how proud my husband is that I, a 38-year-old mother of three, worked up a sweat for 45 minutes. WOW!!!
Nah, man. The fantasy is the point.
Part of the issue has been that Nike has gone from being sui-generis, _generative_ in terms of dictating the narrative to becoming _responsive_, to the latest controversy. The MJ ads were agenda setting, insouciant even, regal one might say? Recent ads, featuring Lebron, Kobe, Serena or Rapinoe, tend to be doubled down, almost insecure responses to caricatured straw men of each of these individuals' "adversaries" or "haters", whose voices have been amplified in a social-media driven content creation feedback loop.
Lebron caught flak for his free agency, and even some of his community work so there have been campaigns where he chose to wear the black hat (to respond to the Decision hate) or championing equality to not-so-subtly position himself as heir to Ali. Similarly, Kobe leaned into the ball-hog chucker reputation and challenged critics in one of his final ads (to good effect). Heck, the entire Black Mamba schtick was manufactured to cope with hate and pressure post Colorado. Rapinoe tends to get a lot of unfair shit for being public with her sexuality and the case on pay structure (details are contested here, and there was some degree of agency the women had, if I recall correctly) so the response has been for her to feature in ads where she and her team are further built up, not backing down.
So while there is a factor of the "creative" class within Nike pushing the woke angle but I think a non-trivial element is also the lack of creativity of this class leading to a default resort to reaction/response campaigns with the resultant steady state being woke content.
This is so, so good! Clarifies a lot of points I’ve been making - much less effectively - about Nike’s advertising, and raises others that I hadn’t really considered. (Personally, my favorite commercial series was the secret tournament spots during the 2002 World Cup with the remix of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation.”)
Thanks. And ya, those ads are super popular. Thought about including them but had to make a cut somewhere.
Watching the "Take it To the Next Level" ad gave me a glimpse into what my grandson loves about hockey, the game he has played passionately for the last 12 years, ever since he saw the sport at age 4. And I am ever so glad he is growing up in a solidly unwoke small city in the midwest, playing a sport that has so far resisted de-masculinization.
Feminist (and also “Woke”) advertisements fail because they’re preachy and, worse, inauthentic.
You quoted Charles Barkley, who explained it: the locker room is sexist, racist, homophobic etc. Are we to believe for a minute that the women’s locker rooms are any different? That women are so different?
Sure many women - many people - bristle at patriarchy, just as many people bristle at institutional racism…but it doesn’t mean these people are dorks. And yet they’re ceaselessly portrayed this way in the media. These ads are cringy not just because they’re lame, but because they don’t represent the truth. People are smarter than that. Whether they know it or not.
The fact that most major corporations are this dumb/anemic/cowardly/disingenuous (pick one or one of your own) isn’t surprising. I’d hope Nike, with their pedigree, would know better. But they don’t.