Nike’s Colin Kaepernick Ad Nearly Didn’t Happen
The moment he took a knee to protest police brutality, Colin Kaepernick became a supercharged symbol. One group sees him as someone who doesn’t respect the troops or the police—someone who uses his position as a famous athlete to grandstand. To many others, he is someone willing to make the ultimate sacrifice: to protest real issues, even at the cost of his job. To Nike, as an illuminating new report in The New York Times makes clear, all that Kaepernick symbolized made him something else, too: a very, very useful marketing tool.
The New York Times writes that the Kaepernick campaign was reportedly one communication director’s freakout away from not happening. Nike trades in marketing athletes and once Kaepernick was no longer part of a professional sports league, people in the brand’s sports marketing group believed that he was no longer useful. So executives allegedly looked to cut him loose before the Swoosh’s head of communications Nigel Powell “went ballistic,” according to the Times. Powell didn’t want Nike to look like it was siding with the NFL, which plays more willingly with Trump than Resistance Twitter, over Kaepernick. But the brand still had to consider its relationship with the NFL, with which Nike signed a 10-year apparel contract just this year.
There was a debate within Nike, a spokesperson confirmed to the Times, but Powell’s side eventually won out. Kaepernick was kept on his contract, which at the time ran through 2019. But the conversation about actually making Kaepernick the face of the Just Do It campaign reportedly didn’t start until even later and only at the behest of several external voices.
The first were Kaepernick’s lawyers, who said that Nike wasn’t properly using their client by just letting him languish in silence. In fact, they argued, Nike had a contractual obligation to use Kaepernick somehow. Nike’s longtime advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy also urged the Swoosh to give Kaepernick a pivotal role in a campaign. Nike also considered the fact that its relationship with the NFL was winding down—it won’t make league merchandise for consumers beyond 2020—so any fallout would be less painful. And maybe most importantly, Nike found that Kaepernick was the right sort of controversial; he pushed the buttons the brand needed him to because his supporters closely aligned with the customer the Swoosh was after.
“Nike, along with most apparel companies, is desperate to attract urban youth who increasingly look up to Kaepernick; the largely white, older N.F.L. fans angry at the league over the protests are not a priority for those companies, analysts say,” the Times writes.
Nike’s thinking about Kaepernick and his campaign is further clarified by the way executives speak about him. Nike's CEO Mark Parker, on a call with investors earlier this week, said he was proud of the new ads, citing the record engagement they drew. The Nike spokesperson told the Times, “The important thing is that we’re using Colin because we consider him one of the most inspirational athletes of his generation.”
Nike still seems to tiptoe around the issues that have made Kaepernick such an inspirational figure—Kaepernick’s speech in the ad itself could have appeared in basically any other Nike commercial. None of this is necessarily wrong; Nike, after all, is a business, and Parker’s job is to maximize shareholder profits. It just so happens that, right now, supporting an activist like Kaepernick is the best way to do so.
