Category Archives: Nike

Apr 09 2010
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Church scandal, Nike, Tiger Woods

What Nike and the Catholic Church have in common.

Well, for one thing they both exploit children.

For another, they are both so hermetically sealed off from the world of their constituents that it can lead them to say and do stupid and hateful things.

The Nike Tiger spot: mea culpa? Teachable moment? B-roll of a news item no longer news? Orville Deadenbacher II?

Who cares? It’s the fact that Nike thought it was OK to leverage this miserable behavior in any way that’s so galling.

You have to actually believe that preserving the millions of dollar of equity Nike built up through Tiger trumps simple human decency, in order to do an ad like this.

Sort of like you have to think the reputation of the organization is more important than the sufferings of individuals in order to compare criticism by its victims to anti-Semitism.

As the Semites would say, it’s a shonda.

Jan 22 2009
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editing techniques, IBM, Nike

An annoying. Annoying. Annoying way. Way to. Way to edit.

Once upon a time there was Nike’s “If you let me play” spot. It was a beautiful commercial, and edited in a startling but ultimately logical way. The echoing words, plaintive and insistent, coming from the mouths and thoughts of young women of different cultures, ages and sports, became a kind of incantation.

Fast forward to now, where this editing approach is used constantly, and annoyingly, to try to give heft to spots devoid of interest. You see it everywhere, from cereal commercials to this new IBM campaign. “We need/we need to work smarter/work smarter/smarter” indeed.

And stutter less.