The Campaign

Product placement and celebrity endorsements dominate branded content in the China market, which has created an environment that revolves largely around driving transactions, which has made it challenging for Nike to break through with a message that isn’t product specific and that is focused on communicating values and spirit, rather than product purchase. The China market is highly restricted and regulated, its a minefield of off limits imagery and subject areas, where everything that goes to broadcast media channels must be approved by the often subjective opinions of individual government censors.

Results

China lacks a running culture. To most people, running was a form of group torture they were forced to endure at school growing up. While there is a small community of passionate runners in China, we wanted to find a broad message and voice to inspire people to reconsider the sport. Strategically we wanted to take on the question most non-runners have of ‘Why run?’ but rather than offer a convenient answer we wanted to prompt the audience to seek the answer for themselves by offering a glimpse of the many different reasons runners love to run and “Let the run tell you why”, because ultimately to understand running is to actually experience it. We set out to tell the diverse and inspiring stories of authentic Chinese runners all speaking to their personal experience of the sport, and what it means to them which we brought to life through 4 longer form executions of runners across the Greater China Region. This was all tied together and anchored by an anthemic film piece that ran on TV. Online, we wove these stories together into a seamless interactive experience, where at key moments, users were prompted to click on a runner and were then brought deeper into that individual runner’s story.

We began by placing provocative questions of “Why Run?” out into the world through a series of billboard executions, our anthem spot aired across mainstream TV channels in the Greater China region, which lead online to an interactive video experience allowing our audience to explore our full range of running stories and experiences. These communications lead into the marathon season where we encouraged our audience to experience the power of a run for themselves, it all culminated with the iconic, inspiring film feature of Mr Sun, the 74 year old runner who quickly became the most talked about runner in China.

Our goal for this campaign was to help move the sport and culture of running in China forward. Through the work we managed to reach millions across China, with over 10 million video content views, and 78 million social impressions. We sparked waves of conversation with 200k comments and re-tweets, 209k #LetTheRunTellYouWhy# hashtag mentions. Most importantly we moved people to not just talk about it, but do something about it resulting in over 8,600 UGC submissions, 30k Nike WeChat Running app downloads and the formation of over 2k new run crews. In the end we managed to inspire millions to question their connection to the sport, encouraging them to simply “Let the run tell you why”.