Toxic, outrageous, truthful or gold medal-worthy: how best to describe Nike’s 2024 campaign, ‘Winning Isn’t for Everyone’? With sporting legends like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Kylian Mbappé and Serena Williams on board, the brand explicitly reaffirmed its core values of athletic excellence and unwavering pursuit of victory in the run-up to the Paris Olympics in an ad campaign that certainly sparked controversy.

What’s the concept behind Nike’s ‘Winning Isn’t for Everyone’?

Under the direction of the agency Wieden & Kennedy Portland, the campaign launched in July 2024, just before the Paris Olympics. As athletes prepared to offer their best performances and achieve the victories of their lives, Nike released a powerful video putting them and their determination at the forefront.

Like that of a coach, Willem Dafoe’s voice accompanies iconic competitors through what Kobe Bryant qualified as the “Mamba Mentality” winning mindset. In response to “Am I A Bad Person?”, the featured sports figures celebrate “the voice of the athlete”, as identified by Nike’s Chief Marketing Officer Nicole Graham.

Let’s run the numbers and compare results to recent campaigns from Nike and competitor Adidas:

• 2.5 million views and 27k likes on YouTube, currently significantly less than for Nike’s 2018 ‘Nothing Beats a Londoner’ campaign

• 38k likes and 4k shares on TikTok

• 228k likes and 78k shares on Instagram, slightly above Nike’s averages on the platform

In comparison, Adidas’ video, released in February 2024 for the ‘You Got This’ campaign, obtained just under 400k views and 4k likes on YouTube. The one launched for the Soccer World Cup on the 13 June 2024, ‘Hey Jude’, received around 1.4 million views, with 43k likes.

However, Nike’s campaign does not stop at the video, instead remaining active offline beyond those 90 seconds.

As many tourists and residents already saw on the façade of Paris’ Centre Pompidou, where Nike’s sports stories were animated and displayed, the advertising is present in cities worldwide.

The campaign also extends with social media films to promote our generation’s winning athletes under the same bold motto. Notably, the Instagram reel honouring Iranian Kimia Alizadeh became one of the brand’s most popular, receiving 800k likes and 117k shares in appreciation for the taekwondo star’s exhibition of the characteristic drive to win.

Why was Nike’s ‘Winning Isn’t for Everyone’ campaign so controversial?

Toxic: that is one adjective used to criticise the ‘Winning Isn’t for Everyone’ campaign.

Others qualify it as outrageous, especially in reaction to the Paris 2024’s pronouncements, based upon founder Pierre de Coubertin’s belief in healthy, communal sports and the word “Communiter” (Community) at the end of the Olympics’ motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger).

Yet others praise the campaign’s truthful representation of the obvious, namely that athletes must fight and show strength to win.

Just like Kobe Bryant and his “Mamba Mentality” winning mindset, NBA star Victor Wembanyama echoes this sentiment, saying: "I’m addicted to winning…The chase is what I love and what I live for."

As Nike itself also reaffirms in its video description, “If you don’t want to win, congrats. You’ve already lost.”

And, while the video’s way of representing Nike’s values through the relentless mind of a champion instead of the traditional feel-good sportsmanship may upset some, it nonetheless captures attention.

Like Oscar Wilde claimed, “There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” In this campaign, opponents and supporters all put Nike at the centre of conversations.

How does ‘Winning Isn’t for Everyone’ compare to other Nike campaigns?

Nike has never been short of creating innovative marketing schemes. All the way back in 1988, the iconic ‘Just Do It’ campaign was ultimately the first of its kind—simple and memorable advertising initiative, featuring videos of legendary athletes, such as Michael Jordan, pushing their limits. The cultural phenomenon’s popularity has been such that it continues to support all of Nike’s other campaigns to this day.

In 2000, ‘Horror, Why Sport?’, also directed by Wieden & Kennedy Portland during the Sydney Olympics, generated a wave of controversy comparable to ‘Winning Isn’t for Everyone’.

Despite being well received amongst young adults, as Nike’s advertising spokesman Scott Reames remarked, the video’s “chain-saw” horror movie parody was too extreme for the larger Olympic audience.

At the time, the NBC even decided to pull it out of the official Olympic advertising lineup. Nevertheless, the brand was ultimately made stronger; becoming a cult classic, the ad propelled Nike in the spotlight before the following campaigns were pursued.

In contrast, the 2012’s ‘Find Your Greatness’ and 2017’s ‘Equality’ campaigns were both more traditional, as they showcased everyday people achieving greatness or athletes of all ethnicities uniting for diversity.

Although less provocative, they both successfully enhanced the brand’s image. ‘Find Your Greatness’, for example, remarkably drove some $506 million in revenue growth and increased the brand’s membership by 55%. We are now waiting to see if the bet of originality will pay off for ‘Winning Isn’t for Everyone’.

Throughout its history, Nike has known how to stand out from the crowd and sustain its innovative marketing strategies, without being intimidated by obstacles. This time, surfing on the media wave of Paris 2024, the brand chose a bold statement; although the campaign has yet to win everyone’s heart, it certainly kept itself in the centre of the fields and stands during the Olympic victories and beyond.

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Take a look our analysis of Nike’s LDNR campaign, from fellow Bootcamp attendee Callum Slatter. Then get in touch to talk marketing audits, communications strategy and marketing consultancy with Sookio.