1996 OLYMPICS

Nike invests a lot of money in the Olympics, through athlete sponsorships, entertainment/exhibition areas on-site, shoes/apparel/equipment for the athletes, public relations and advertising. In 1996, the Olympics in Atlanta were setting up to be the most saturated Olympics ever from a marketing point of view. Setting Nike apart from every other brand was going to be hard.

This insight didn’t come from research. It came from Tom Bassett. Tom had been on the Canadian National Rowing Team in 1987, and competed at the World University Games in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. His team finished 7th. A lot of people were happy for him when he got back home, but honestly, it was one of the biggest disappointments he had ever experienced. He didn’t give up eight years of his life training to finish 7th. He raced to win. That’s how high performance athletes feel about world-class competition. Yet, no brand had ever revealed that truth. Brands like McDonalds and Home Depot associate themselves with the Olympic Games, and communicate fabricated feel-good messages of unity and goodwill. Nike, on the other hand, is positioned as an authentic athletic performance sports brand. So it was only fitting that they would genuinely represent the truth of how a Nike Olympic athlete really felt about Olympic competition. So the insight that drove the global Nike Olympics effort in 1996 was this: despite the veneer of the Olympics, world-class athletes compete with an intensity and near-pathological desire for victory.

How do we communicate the idea that to the Nike athlete, "sport is war minus the killing?” (George Orwell)