Results and Effectiveness

A few thousand retweets quickly climbed to tens of thousands, and culminated in Nike dominating conversation at a crucial moment- when Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang fell during the 110-meter hurdles. That post jumped to over 125,000 retweets becoming the number one topic on Chinese social media. Nike's point of view on Greatness became a cultural phenomenon across China. The news talked about it. Sports commentators quoted it. Nike earned over 168million impressions on social media. While numbers are nice, the real success of the campaign was challenging a myth of greatness, and helping Chinese kids see it's within their reach.

Creative Execution

To truly redefine greatness, we had to go deeper than where our audience was watching the games. We had to be where 700 million people were talking about it - The Chinese Social Media Networks. We sparked it all off on our Nike sports communities then amplified the conversation supported by athletes and influencers across Weibo and QQ. We set up a social media command center and staffed it with creatives, strategists and community managers. We wired-up with live feeds of the games and our communities, tooled-up with custom programs to run the whole thing. We operated around the clock, monitoring the buzz to react in real time to the games. While the Chinese state media focused only on gold, Nike celebrated the winners, silvers, bronzes and even the athletes who came in 6th. Over 17 days of the games, we delivered 49 counter-strikes, helping redefine greatness with every message.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Our goal was to offer a new generation of young Chinese athletes a different way to see sporting greatness, and help clear the way for more kids to participate in sport. Our core insight was that greatness is a constructed lie, elevated and placed beyond the reach of most of us, when in reality all of us are capable of it. In China this insight was particularly relevant as kids grow up in a culture of intense pressure and expectation. Where in sport and in life anything less than success is often seen as failure, and this fear of failure becomes a barrier to active participation. To succeed, we used the buzz of the 2012 Olympics to challenge the perceptions of traditional greatness, and honor the pursuit of greatness, not just of gold.