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19.7: Case study - Nike Chicago Cubs Someday

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    43134

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    One-line summary

    Nike created a video celebration of the Chicago Cubs’ first World Series win since 1908.

    The challenge

    The Chicago Cubs hadn’t won a World Series in 107 years, so their win in 2016 offered brands a chance to show their support and win customer goodwill. Nike wanted to get in on this historic occasion.

    The solution

    Nike spent all week rallying Chicago with a “Make Someday Today” campaign that included billboards, social media, and more. On the night of the game, Nike purchased the first ad slot after the game and used it to air their video ad about a boy dreaming of winning the World Series.

    They uploaded the video to YouTube. Because the branding in the video is subtle (mostly product placement on the boy’s shoes and gloves), the video is not overtly promotional and thus more likely to appeal to online viewers. This makes it one of the rare examples of a TV spot that works just as well online. They followed some important best practice principles when creating this video:

    • Producing great video content with a focus on value for the consumer rather than for the brand
    • Effective targeting
    • Relevance. It was timed well and was emotionally relevant to their target audience
    • Engaging with users on social media to drive traffic to the video and sharing the video itself on social media as well
    • Effective research to understand what would appeal to their target market.

    The results

    The video gained 1.5 million views within a week. It also gained a huge amount of earned media via sports coverage, news articles mentioning the video and social media shares, all of which were incredibly positive.

    clipboard_e669f0f9ea4e8d20e9ee7f709b94721ba.png
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The Nike Someday ad, showing subtle branding and good use of annotations (the Nike swoosh) to include a call to action Adapted From Digital training academy, 2016

    This page titled 19.7: Case study - Nike Chicago Cubs Someday is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Rob Stokes via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.