A deeper look into how Nike’s latest ad is more than just marvellous narrations and appealing visuals.
Why is Nike’s new ad breaking the internet?
Nike, the renown sports brand, is celebrating sports and diversity with its latest advertisement. With a subtle yet powerful message in the line “We are never alone”, Nike beautifully delivers a message that sports is not just an event but the way we sail through testing times. In just a minute and a half, this advertisement leaves the audience with hope and a sporting spirit.
By showcasing people from different sporting backgrounds and geographic regions, Nike does a wonderful job to illustrate a spirit of unity. With extra-ordinary visuals and a strong narration, it “highlights the power of sport and how it has the ability to bring us together and invite change”. Not only this, but the ad also denotes LGBTQ rights when a person throwing rainbow colours is shown.
With a tagline “You can’t stop sport. Because you can’t stop us”, the advertisement transcended all boundaries and reflects a bigger message of having a responsibility to make this world a better place. By capturing emotions, Nike explores specific issues including Covid and issues of race, gender and equality in a way that resonates with the audience, demonstrating itself as a socially conscious brand.
But what really makes this advertisement so different?
It is the underpinnings of the commercial that tries to illustrate a larger point. By using the split-screen format to demonstrate the same agonies and triumphs of athletes from almost every sport, Nike tries to showcase that everyone is equal, no matter their race, gender, sexual orientation, or even the sport they play.
By using emotional narration, the video addresses ongoing issues drawing a sense of community and allowing the consumers to resonate with it. By using emotional branding, it does an incredible job at making its customers relate to Nike as an optimistic brand. Instead of focusing on product promotions, Nike tries to induce emotions into its customer, building emotional loyalty.
Moreover, its context style is congruent to the type of advertisement. Its positive emotional context primes the customer’s feeling and knowledge structures, enabling the elaboration of its brand messages that were already known and that did not require extensive cognitive elaboration. Nike improved its Advertising effectiveness by putting the right advertisement in the right context.
It’s advertisement’s media context serves as a primer to make consumers more susceptible to its advertisement. It is due to its media context that the audience processes its advertisement so intensively. By dropping a highly mood-congruent advertisement, Nike makes certain needs of the customer more salient and stimulates their motivation to pay attention. For Nike’s customers, their need for resonating and feeling optimistic about the future is what stimulates their motivation to easily process the ad.
In order to compete with others, companies use creative and appealing advertisements to lure consumers. Such creative advertising maximizes their profits and provides a positive image to businesses. And this is exactly what Nike did beautifully. By utilising a combination of “thinking and feeling ads”, Nike allows consumers to look at the advertising core from two perspectives: its advertising to inform, explain, remind, encourage, build its brand image in consumers minds and utilise its advertisement as a convincing tool to dramatically depict its brand personality as well as other brand attributes.
Well all in all, with over 17 million views on Twitter, Nike has once again proved itself for having the knack of doing the best storytelling.
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References:
https://www.sbnation.com/2020/7/31/21349439/nike-ad-all-athletes-created-equal
Advertising for New and Existing Brands: The Impact of Media Context and Type of Advertisement by Wim Janssens & Patrick De Pelsmacker
Importance of Creative Advertising and Marketing According to University Students’ Perspective by Remziye Terkan
