A new digital campaign from Nike called ‘Play New’ – which spans video, Snapchat and TikTok – celebrates play over competition and the freedom of not getting it right on the first try by encouraging viewers to try new sports – even if, at first, they suck at them.
The creative, which will run through 2021, features elite athlete ambassadors (and a Grammy winner, plus social media creators) trying out something new (and failing).
The initiative was created in collaboration with long-time Nike agency Wieden+Kennedy and is spearheaded by a 60-second spot starring basketball player Sabrina Ionescu, sprinter Dina Asher-Smith and Paralympian Blake Leeper (and singer-songwriter Rosalía) trying their hand at new sports.
The video sees Ionescu play tennis, Asher-Smith take a swing at golf, Leper tackle baseball, while Rosalía tries archery.
The ad celebrates the idea that ‘improving is part of the joy of learning’ and the joy of ‘giving it your all, even if you kind of suck’.
The lead ‘Play New’ spot was posted across Nike platforms on 6 May.
As well as the lead commercial, Nike also launched full-body Snapchat augmented reality lenses on its new business profile which include custom lenses for yoga and dancing, plus surfing and boxing and which also link to user scores on the platform’s Persistent Storage functionality.
While on TikTok, Nike is rolling out an ongoing series of episodic journeys starring a group of TikTok creators who all amplify the ‘Play New’ message of experimenting with activities outside of their comfort zones.
This joins more intimate spotlights on Asher-Smith and Ionescu, who will share stories of their come-up and comment on the future of sport for young women. Those additional stories come courtesy of agency R/GA.
At the campaign launch Melanie Auguste, Nike VP of Global Brand Marketing, explained that the message is about how harnessing the joy of sport is itself a life hack.
“Play means joy,” Auguste commented. “It represents pure enjoyment and being able to just be free. All kids play. That’s just a natural thing they do. “The reason we are encouraging people to Play New is to celebrate that notion of getting back to the joy of discovering and trying something for the first time—the joy of letting loose a little bit.”
“Sport is one of the greatest ways to watch our growth as human beings,” congtinued Auguste. “Think about all the different ways that you can move. As a kid, with my brothers, we would mimic the sports we saw on TV. One we did the most was the high jump. We had a bed with posts, so we would tie a string, and then we would take turns jumping over that. We would then go onto our cul-de-sac and run sprints. We had a pool, so then we’d try to do the butterfly. I’m pretty sure we were not doing it right. It was some form of just belly flops. All of that movement and play brought us so much joy.”
Comment:
Nike again show brand ambition and even suggests that if you want to make change in the world, you must first mirror that change you want in yourself and shows how sport is a vehicle to get to know yourself, to become comfortable with yourself, to be confident and to try concepts out that you will use in the world.
From the resilience of learning, to the process of working with a team and confronting challenges to build confidence, the underlying message here is that when you step into the world and see things you want to change, you’ve had a place where you’ve practiced that and done that, because sport is a microcosm of the broader world.
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