“Nike ambushes Adidas on world stage…again.”

Adage

Nike was successful in connecting with consumers, driving conversation and creating community around the biggest global sporting event.

Key metrics during the Games compared to all Olympic advertisers:

• #1 most talked about campaign in social media

• Find Your Greatness was the most mentioned campaign on Twitter

• Most viewed campaign online

• Most engaged brand on Facebook

• Grew Nike+ community by +55% throughout the Olympic season

• Nike gained 3.5M new Nike+ members in 9 weeks. It took 6 years to get 6.4M members.

• +10% in Incremental Sales Globally

Find Your Greatness was a complex campaign that was launched simultaneously around the globe in 21 countries.

The orchestration of the communications levers was imperative to activating consumers to participate in the campaign.

Our comms goal was to own the 72 hours leading into the opening ceremonies. From globally broadcasting the POV on YouTube to allowing consumers to make the POV their own on Twitter to sharing the POV on Facebook, Nike owned the conversation. And ultimately, we broadcast the POV on TV during the opening ceremonies.

Throughout the games, we deployed a social strategy that dominated the real-time conversation around the Olympics by juxtaposing great athletic feats taking place in London with acts of Greatness taking place by everyday people in communities around the globe.

The culmination of the campaign was August 12. We utilized Nike+ to create an event entitled The Most Active Day in History.

While not an Olympics sponsor, Nike’s ambition was to be the #1 most talked about and engaged brand during the Olympics. We needed to ignite conversation and get people talking and sharing our POV so that Nike, not sponsors, owned the moment. Kids had grown detached from professional athletes -- they admired their skill from afar but no longer felt inspired. Pushing the limits of your potential was something only for the “athletic elite.”

We realized that the idea of “greatness” had become misused in sports culture. We needed to redefine what greatness truly is -- greatness is only out of reach if we stop reaching, Nike wanted to give the next generation of athletes enough internal motivation to believe in themselves and go for it.

So while the world focused its attention on the elite striving for gold, Nike invited consumers around the world to Find their Greatness.