Just do it
And take the consequences
IT’S BEEN a long time since some of us thought about shoe company Nike. When was the last time it was in the news? Maybe the last appearance it made on the opinion pages was back in the 1980s, when it used a song from The Beatles in one of its commercials. Some of our more solemn opinion brethren were quite put out, or acted so.
If Miss Yoko and her people wanted to sell “Revolution” to push inventory on TV, let ‘em. How American to take a British song about 1960s protests, turn it into a commercial to sell a global product, and have the surviving members of the band sue in protest. The whole situation couldn’t have been more American if John Lennon had sung about apple pie.
But that’s been a while. Call it several ad campaigns ago. Perhaps the PR folks at Nike needed a way to nudge themselves back into the news again.
Credit where due: They certainly pulled it off. The company has decided to take a former pro football player of some note and create an ad campaign around him.
Peyton Manning? A two-time Super Bowl champion and all-around pitchman?
Eli Manning? A two-time Super Bowl champion and not-as-good-a-pitchmanas-his-brother?
Russell Wilson? A Super Bowl champion and all-around good guy, role model and religious man?
No.
Nike went with Colin Kaepernick, who is more famous for kneeling during the national anthem before football games, back when he was playing football, than anything he did on the field.
Nike shares fell 3 percent on the news when the markets opened yesterday.
“Nike’s campaign will generate both attention and discussion which is, arguably, one of its central aims,” said one Neil Saunders, who’s a managing director of GlobalData Retail. “However, it is also a risky strategy in that it addresses, and appears to take sides on, a highly politicized issue.”
That is, it’s an attention-getting tactic. And it worked. One ad featured the former 49er with these words plastered over his face: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
Maybe Nike calculated that this ad would appeal to the millenials and other young people, the ones who have many more years to buy their shoes and apparel. Maybe the company thinks many of these young people believe America to be a bad country. Certainly some people today don’t even realize that when our founders set forth the ideal of “We hold these truths to be self evident, that that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” that America was the first county to do this. Ever. In the history of mankind. And that men and now women have been willing to fight and die for this ideal, beginning with the Revolutionary War, then the Civil War, and many wars thereafter. Other reportedly well-educated Americans have expressed their doubts, like Michelle Obama, when she said of her husband’s election that it was the first time she was ever be proud of America. Maybe Nike is making a cold, hard business decision to side with these doubters.
But the suits at Nike might consider the attention Colin Kaepernick brought to the NFL when he played, and after the pre-game kneeling caught on around the league: Television ratings for the NFL were down more than 9 percent in 2017. That’s for a league that has been used to double-digit increases in everything from television revenue to ticket sales to team values. As Albert Brooks once said in a movie, this league owns an entire day. The church used to own it, now the NFL does.
But the American people will only be offended so often before they turn off even their beloved football. A 9 percent drop is serious money. It’s serious business.
So is selling shoes. Maybe Nike is looking over its shoulders at Adidas and Under Armour, and it needed this jolt of energy.
Americans are just as free to buy from its rivals in the free market. What a country!
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All this reminds us of last fall, when GQ magazine named Colin Kaepernick its Citizen of the Year. Some of us didn’t know that GQ magazine named such a person. Some of us didn’t know that GQ magazine was still in print.
But it gave the magazine some temporary press, and some of us even spelled its name right. It’s only two letters. Spelling Nike isn’t too difficult, either. In these days of social media and instant, breathless reporting by the 24/7 news channels, even a so-so former quarterback without a spot on a team can make news. Emphasis on “make.”