Sixty seconds. The copy on Nike's own US channel has long since gone, so this is Nike France's upload, which is still a Nike channel and still the English original.
Nike was not the sponsor of London 2012. Adidas was, at a reported hundred million pounds, and UK legislation written specifically for the Games made it an offence for a non-sponsor to combine words like "London", "2012", "games", "gold", "medal" and "summer" in a way that implied association. The rings, the athletes, the vocabulary itself: all fenced off.
Everyone else in that position fights over the scraps left outside the fence. W+K looked at the fence and noticed something better. The Olympics had quietly taken sole ownership of the word greatness, and in doing so had defined it as gold medals and superhuman bodies. Which is a definition that politely excludes almost every person watching. There was a much bigger territory sitting right there, unowned and unprotected by any statute.
Do not fight for the assets. Redefine the word.
Greatness is not a gift handed to a chosen few, it is available to everybody, and the Olympics is just the loudest annual reminder of it. So the hero of the flagship film is not a sprinter. It is Nathan Sorrell, twelve years old and heavily overweight, jogging slowly and painfully down an empty road at dawn in London, Ohio.
The wider "Greatness Anywhere" series was shot in towns called London all over the world, in Ohio, Norway, Jamaica, Nigeria and East London in South Africa. That is the whole ambush compressed into a location scout. Nike never says "London 2012". It just keeps saying London, and lets you finish the sentence, and there is nothing the lawyers can do about a town in Ohio.
Underneath that, Nike ran a 24-hour social command centre for the duration of the Games, reacting in real time to what was happening on screen, and pointedly celebrating the sixth-place finisher as much as the winner. So the message stayed consistent from the sixty-second film all the way down to a tweet about someone's heat. The non-sponsor spent the fortnight talking about the Olympics more fluently than the sponsor.
The stupid: run your biggest campaign of the year on an event you are legally barred from mentioning, in a country that passed a law to stop you. Then cast, as the face of a sportswear brand, a struggling twelve-year-old who is visibly not an athlete, and put him on screen for sixty seconds doing something slowly and badly.
The smart: the redefinition makes the ban irrelevant. You cannot legislate ownership of an idea, only of trademarks, so Nike moved the whole fight onto ground with no fence. And the casting is not sentimentality, it is targeting: the addressable market for "you could win a gold medal" is a few hundred people, the addressable market for "you could go for a run tomorrow" is everyone who buys trainers. The ordinary hero is the commercially bigger idea, not the softer one. It also quietly inoculates Nike against the charge of ambushing, because the film is not about the Olympics at all, it is about a kid in Ohio.
The steal: when you cannot compete on their terms, change the definition of the term everyone is competing over. Nike did not buy its way into the conversation, it took the single most valuable word in the event and gave it a bigger, more generous meaning that happened to point straight at its customers. Ask what word your category has quietly made too narrow.
The device is redefine the word, and it is one of the most portable moves in the whole library. Three UK did it to "silly" with a dancing pony. Barclays did it to "big". Once you have seen it you find the opportunity in about half of all briefs, because most categories have one word everybody is fighting over and nobody has thought to redefine.
One honest note: this is a beloved campaign rather than a decorated one. It picked up bronzes and merits, not a Grand Prix. Awards juries reward the novel mechanic; this was a very old mechanic executed with unusual nerve. Worth remembering when a piece of work you love comes back from Cannes empty-handed.
Straight talk: the 37/24 figure comes from a consumer survey run during the Games and is quoted everywhere without a consistent methodology attached, so treat it as directional. The follower comparison is the sturdier number, partly because adidas itself published its side of it. Nobody has ever produced a clean sales attribution for this campaign, and anyone who tells you they have is selling something.
Client: Nike
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy, Portland
Creative directors: Ryan O'Rourke, Alberto Ponte
Art directors: Sezay Altinok, Aramis Israel, Sara Phillips
Copywriters: Caleb Jensen, Brock Kirby
Director: Lance Acord · Production: Park Pictures
The Jogger: Nathan Sorrell, of London, Ohio
Wieden+Kennedy, Greatness Is In Everyone
Campaign, Greatness Anywhere, with full credits
Fast Company, the Olympics ad that isn't an Olympics ad
D&AD 2013, Nike Olympics, Find Your Greatness
Campaign, adidas publishes its own Olympic Twitter numbers
The device behind this one, from our library of ways in: