An early August spot from Nike applied artificial intelligence (AI) to archive action footage to generate 130,000 games between Serena Williams’ from two different eras to celebrate significant moments through the brand’s history framed around the achievements of some of its highest profile athlete ambassadors – including Serena Williams.
The US sportswear behemoth teamed up with agency AKQA (including AKQA studios in Melbourne, Portland and São Paulo) for a video which runs under the brand’s ongoing 50th anniversary celebrations and which leverages tennis icon William’s recent retirement (career evolution) announcement ahead of her final Grand Slam – the 2022 US Open.
As Williams plays her 27th and last year as a tennis professional, Nike showcases how her game has evolved over time to create a commercial using AI and machine learning which features the tennis legend’s evolution in a match-up of the ages pitting her first Grand Slam title at the 1999 US Open against her most recent at the 2017 Australian Open.
The brand’s stated aim was ‘to gain insight on how Serena got to where she is today and how she keeps challenging the future’ and it achieved this by applying ‘machine learning to model each era’s playing style – including decision making, shot selection, reactivity, recovery and agility – based on archival footage’.
Nike brought the two versions of Williams to life by building on the ‘vid2player technique’ developed at Stanford University and re-rendering the players from each generation into a new scenario in which they appear to be playing and responding to one other.
Promoted via social media posts across Nike’s Instagram and Twitter channels, the project funnelled fans to a final gameplay broadcast as a YouTube livestream which reached more than 1.69m Nike’s subscribers.
Titled ‘Nike 50th Anniversary | Never Done Evolving featuring Serena Williams’, the spearhead spot debuted on 11 August and was deployed across the brand’s digital and social channels with additional creative support.
As @SerenaWilliams enters the next chapter of her career, we wanted to see how she evolved as a tennis player.
So, we used AI to generate 130,000 games between Serena from 1999 and 2017.
Watch now #Nike50
— Nike (@Nike) August 12, 2022
The spot also urges viewers to subscribe to Nike’s channel to see how the brand ‘brings innovation and inspiration to every athlete in the world’ and explore its mission ‘to do everything possible to expand human potential by creating ground-breaking sport innovations, by making our products more sustainably, by building a creative and diverse global team and by making a positive impact in communities where we live and work’.
Comment
Game, Set, Match – Serena.
The result offers a glimpse of Serena William’s play across 130,000 games and 5,000 matches – an entire year of tennis if played back-to-back – across decades of commitment, talent and a determination to never stop evolving and to find new ways to challenge convention and expectation.
Whether this creative approach acts as a step towards a future of blending sports analytics and marketing to create more human readable data visualisation, or whether it is just a fun, one-off gimmick remains to be seen.
Either way, it is creatively compelling.
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