Excerpts from Chapter 10 of "The Art of Immersion" by Frank Rose

Chapter 10 – This is Your Brand on YouTube

THE FULLEST CURRENT REALIZATION for this way of thinking is Nike+, an R/GA–assisted partnership between Nike and Apple that turns running—generally a fairly solitary activity—into a social experience. When Law says people get information from their community and community from their information, he is not in fact offering a Zen kōan. Nike+ is what he has in mind.

Introduced in the summer of 2006 and refined multiple times since, Nike+ bears no resemblance to conventional advertising. It consists of a sensor that goes into your shoe, a wireless connection so the sensor can broadcast data to an iPod or iPhone strapped to your arm, and a software interface that lets you easily upload this data from your iPod to the Internet. The sensor calculates your speed by measuring the length of time your foot is on the ground and transmits that data to your arm. After your run, you sync the data with your computer through iTunes, which automatically sends it to Nikeplus.com. There you have access to your entire running history, complete with graphs and goals. You can record your progress and match yourself against other people. You can form a club and challenge other people on the site, anywhere they happen to be on the globe. Nike+ turns running into a game, one you can play by yourself or with others.

Nike already had one of the longest-running and most memorable ad campaigns around: “Just Do It,” built around a slogan that’s become so closely identified with the brand that the word “Nike” no longer even has to be mentioned. Introduced in 1988 and in use ever since, “Just Do It” is credited with enabling Nike to zoom past Reebok, the dominant sport shoe brand of the eighties, growing its worldwide sales from under $900 million to $9.2 billion in 10 years. As powerful as it is, however, “Just Do It” is ultimately just a slogan. Nike+ is a tool—an application that provides very personal, user-specific information while ushering you into a global community of runners.

“Just Do It” emerged from a meeting between Nike, headquartered in suburban Beaverton, Oregon, and its Portland-based ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy. Nike+ came out of an entirely different process. It’s the product of a three-way development effort involving engineers at Nike, Apple, and R/GA. The team at Nike’s Techlab did the initial prototyping; the Apple group perfected the sensor; designers and programmers at R/GA, under Law’s supervision, developed the software and the interface that made it work.

Law drew a diagram on a whiteboard to explain R/GA’s approach. He was sketching out a four-part talent map divided up according to way of thinking:

At the top are the storytellers; on the left are the idea people; on the right are the people who make everything look good. These are the familiar components of any ad agency team. At the bottom are the newcomers, the systems thinkers. The ones who are there because 60-odd years ago, Norbert Wiener introduced cybernetics, and with it a way of thinking that combines an engineering sensibility with a view of the whole.

Law pointed to the systems node. “In the old world”—meaning the world before the Internet—“the bottom half of this diagram didn’t exist. But you don’t get from ‘Just Do It’ to putting a monitor on your arm. Nike+ was conceived down here”—where the systems thinkers live.

Law referred to Nike+ not as a campaign but as a platform—as in a software platform, a structure on which individual applications can be built. He also described it as “a media channel,” in the same way that television and radio are media channels, or that YouTube has become a media channel for brands like Carl’s Jr. But he noted an important distinction between this and other media channels: “We own it. We’re not buying it.”

There’s another distinction Law didn’t mention. This is a media channel that doesn’t read like advertising; it reads like a popular movement. In 2007, Nike+ won the Advertising Club of New York’s international award for the most brilliant work of the year. Yet Wired ran a 4,200-word cover story about it that didn’t mention R/GA’s role or its function as a marketing tool. Nike+ blurs the line so thoroughly that its marketing function can go unnoticed.

In August 2008 and again in October 2009, Nike showed what such a platform could do. It staged an event called the Human Race, a 10-kilometer race held in some two dozen cities across the planet on a single day. The Human Race transformed Nike+ into a global, 3-D, highly participatory billboard for Nike itself. Some 780,000 humans took part the first year, a million the second—12,000 in Seoul; 9,900 in Guangzhou; 7,900 in Singapore; 9,400 in Tel Aviv; 5,100 in Berlin; 1,400 in London; 4,400 in Rio de Janeiro; 11,000 in Buenos Aires; 3,500 in New York; 14,000 in Mexico City. It was a rolling wave of human feet, an endorphin high that rippled across the planet, crossing oceans and continents in time with the sun. City challenged city, country challenged country, and at the end of the day the contestants could feed their photos into the system and get a personalized commemorative book. A magazine in Singapore called it “the day Nike united the world.”

Bob Greenberg once wrote in a column in Adweek that Nike has moved “from great storytelling to a digital world of customer connections.” But that doesn’t mean Nike has abandoned stories. “You could argue that Nike+ is a story about running, told through data,” said Law. “It’s a matrix of stories. It’s your own story, and it’s brand stories. People jump from one to another, and the doorway to it is your own data.” Describing all this, he began to sound like Will Wright on The Sims: much as play gives rise to stories in Wright’s game, running gives rise to stories on Nike+. “As a brand,” Law said, “do you want to create a game environment? Can you compete with Nintendo? There are times when you can—especially when your brand connects with data.” Brands become games, and games become stories. “That’s why Nike+ works.”