The Brief

Unlike their Western counterparts, to many Hong Kong youths, summer holidays mean more time to do the same old activities. With limited activities and Hong Kong’s scorching heat, most of them settle for an indoor routine: shopping, movies, going to restaurants, and more commonly, mucking around on the Internet. “Own the Night” is a series of sporting events that transforms the city into a nocturnal playground for sports during the night. Nike was confident of their ability to deliver a great offline experience with the Own the Night events. The big challenge was how to successfully spread the word about the Own the Night events, and most importantly, mobilise Hong Kong youths who would most-likely be unmotivated by a night time sport event during the summer. We had to build social relevance for sport. By positioning our events as social activities, we made sports less daunting to our target audience. Sport is no longer a task, but an exciting, fun, and more importantly, a social experience. However, building great experiences isn’t enough. We needed to reach out to the target in channels that matter to them most. More importantly, channels they would most likely go to and to socialize.

We knew we had to tap into their existing social behaviors via mobile. WeChat & Facebook were their favored mobile activities, with this in mind we decided against creating a branded app – it would simply be another barrier to participate and we needed to make the interaction as welcoming as possible. We chose WeChat as our platform partner because their API facilitated our vision for push notifications, utilizing mobile cameras, and location detection. WeChat contained an instant messaging (IM) function, and we had big plans to use IM to give our experience the human touch. We developed a hub that let our night athletes check out and enroll in Nike’s nighttime sports activities. The hub featured world-first functionalities on WeChat that led participants from the sports field to a Nike store. The journey covered: • IM between friends and Nike’s army of IM athletes engaged specifically for this event, including international basketball star Kobe Bryant. • Check-in at the night sports ground • Personalized sporting pledge with a Nike branded statement to show off to friends • Built-in photo app with Nike filters to capture the action • Printable functionality instore, to print your Nike branded photos Our approach blew up the consumer behavior of IM chat, a social communication our target market heavily relied on. We engaged a dedicated team to IM chat with Hong Kong youths throughout the entire campaign, day and night, giving the experience a truly human touch. They felt completed connected to the brand on a personal level, it wasn’t a faceless brand sharing news, it was a person who reminded you there is a game on tonight, who you shared your big sport moments with after the game was over. It was a personal connection and it was a huge success.

On behalf of Nike, we broke new grounds on two fronts for the award-winning summer campaign, Own the Night. Not only did the team manage to get thousands of Hong Kong youths playing sports in the peak of summer, we also left a legacy on social media platform WeChat by creating five new functionalities. This campaign allowed Nike to be the first brand in Hong Kong to roll out the new WeChat menu bar. In one month (July to Aug), our WeChat fan number and engagement rates were tremendously boosted to 16,489. We processed 13,896 messages from participants. Furthermore, we produced 15,053 Nike stickers. The campaign website received a total of 484,168 pages views and reached 226,106 unique visitors. Night illuminates new possibilities to move!