NIKE WAS READY FOR THIS BLITZ FROM TRUMP’S BASE
Company more than likely expected outcry over controversial Kaepernick ad campaign
The belief that Colin Kaepernick could ruin football has survived for longer than expected.
This is a sport that has carried on in the face of much adversity, the most serious of which was the revelation in recent years that playing football dramatically increases the risk of long-term debilitating injury. It and the NFL in particular are such a significant part of the culture in North America that even this has been largely overlooked. Loss of cognitive function, you say? But it’s Sunday and please pass the nachos.
But Kaepernick and those who followed his lead in using the moment of the U.S. national anthem to protest racial injustice are frequently held up as a much more grave threat to the football business. Everyone, from U.S. President Donald Trump to talkshow hosts to random Twitter eggs, has insisted players who “disrespect” the anthem — their word, not mine — will cause fans to flee football by the millions.
The actual evidence of this happening has not materialized. Television ratings have dropped in recent seasons, but football has done quite well relative to the steep declines across broadcast networks.
And now the NFL, thanks to the actions of one of its major corporate sponsors, finds itself with the anthem controversy inflamed — in some cases literally this time — again.
It all leads to an existential question, one that isn’t just about football, but is about the United States in 2018. Everyone knows that country is sharply divided right now. But is it a 50-50 split between those who still consider themselves proudly pro-Trump and those who do not or is the rabidly pro-Trump slice of the pie smaller than that? Are the people who work themselves into a lather about kneeling football players really representative of a large swath of the population or are they more of a vocal rump?
Nike, it would seem, is placing a very large bet on the latter.
Nothing that has unfolded since Nike unveiled its new ad, with Kaepernick as the centrepiece, could have been a surprise to executives at the sporting goods giant.
The social media outcry, with the burning of Nike shoes and socks and the dreaded boycott hashtag, was as inevitable as the Buffalo Bills having problems at quarterback. It does make you wonder what would have happened if it was, say, Ford that put the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback in its ads. Would the people burning their Air Jordans be taking a sledgehammer to their F-150s?
And so there have been the stories about the drop in the company’s stock and the Twitter posts of people furiously carving the Nike swoosh off their garments, presumably while humming The Star- Spangled Banner as a majestic bald eagle soars overhead.
It’s the kind of thing that brands — sorry, #brands — generally try to avoid. Every time some airline falls into a social media boycott pit, as airlines tend to do since they are singularly adept at angering their customers, the company scrambles to apologize and stem the online tide.
What’s striking in the Nike case is that the marketers brought this on themselves. Consider that the NFL, a multibillion-dollar business controlled by a bunch of insanely wealthy individuals, has repeatedly been spooked by the whole idea of players protesting during the anthem. The league rewrote its rules in the spring to effectively ban kneeling, only to relent when the players insisted they had a right to be consulted on such changes. Various reports, from ESPN and other outlets, have said over the last year that many NFL owners have been terrified of losing business over the anthem-related controversies. And, of course, Kaepernick himself remains out of a job for the second straight season, even though he is plainly good enough to be on an NFL roster. That’s the crux of the Nike ad, in fact, which features his face and the words “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” The thing he sacrificed, it turned out, was his career. None of the NFL’s 32 teams have offered him a job since he became the face of the player protests, this despite a resume that included playoff success at the game’s most important position.
As has been pointed out many times since Kaepernick launched a lawsuit that alleges the NFL’s owners colluded to keep him out of the league, every week of games provides a blooper reel of plays from actual employed quarterbacks that makes a convincing case for the plaintiff. But the teams would rather give jobs to luminaries like Cody Kessler, Nathan Peterman and Jeff Driskel (note: actual people!) than risk any part of a potential Kaepernick backlash. The anthem issue worries the NFL enough that ESPN, under a new president, has assured it that it won’t show the anthem as part of its Monday night broadcasts, lest anyone be caught kneeling or raising a fist or something else that could spark a presidential tweetstorm.
And yet here comes Nike, which sells a range of fungible products and is much more likely to be boycotted than a football league, to make a public stand with the guy the NFL doesn’t want, and to bet there is more to be gained in the long term by absorbing the blast from Trump and his allies in the short term.
Nike, hardly a paragon of corporate virtue, must have researched and focus-grouped this move to death. I am curious to know what it told them.
Nothing that has unfolded since Nike unveiled its new ad, with Kaepernick as the centrepiece, could have been a surprise to executives.