Gerry Farrell reflects on a lunch with Dan Wieden, Nike’s clashes with Adidas, and the suspicion that the Portland brand is getting back on track.
Back in a different millennium, my boss, the legendary Jim Downie, invited Dan Wieden, the best creative director in the world at the time, up to Scotland to talk to all of us at The Leith Agency.
They invited me to lunch before the gig, and I was lucky enough to sit next to Dan. I asked him if he still did a bit of copywriting. “Not any more,” he said. “What was the last thing you wrote?” “Just do it,” he answered nonchalantly.
The best creative director in the world. The best slogan in the world. And he said it like it was nothing. Who’d have thought that the last words of a convicted killer would be the creative platform that turned a brand for professional athletes into a brand for everybody? (Gary Gilmore told his firing squad ‘Let’s do it’ and that was Wieden’s inspiration.)
‘Just Do It’ gave us all the encouragement we needed to stop making excuses and start making strides.
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I didn’t tell Dan then, but I’ll confess now; I’ve always preferred Adidas. The three stripes work much harder than Nike’s swoosh. On tops or bottoms they give the human body a graphic outline. So they’re not just a logo like Nike’s tick, they’re God’s gift to clothes designers. And the bold, fast-forward angle they’re set at on trainers screams fashion and performance.
Through the Nineties, Nike was the frontrunner but at the turn of the century Adidas began to close the gap with a line that was as good as its look: ‘Impossible Is Nothing’. The story goes that this was pinched from Muhammed Ali who once said “Impossible is nothing. It’s just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than explore the power they have to change it.”
Whether Ali actually said this or not, the sentiment that ‘we make high performance look easy’, sparked groundbreaking ‘event’ ads like world-class sprinters running up the side of tall buildings and powerful TV spots like the little South American kid searching waste ground for plastic bags then fashioning them into a football and doing impossible tricks with it.
I’ve no idea what will happen now it has binned ‘Impossible Is Nothing’ in favour of ‘You Got This’. What I do know is that suddenly it is going to have plenty of competition from Nike, whose star has been losing its shine for the last decade.
Last year, Nike’s share price plummeted when the company announced its second-quarter sales had declined by 10%.
It had to do something. New CEO Elliot Hill is taking the brand right back to its roots in sport with innovations for professional athletes that are already making global headlines.
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A motor-powered running shoe? A self-inflating Winter Olympics jacket? Eric Haaland’s neuroscientific pre-match ‘mind shoes’?
This is brave, brand-leading stuff born out of their new mission: ‘Create Epic Shit, Make Athletes Better.’
They were the world’s ballsiest brand for decades. If it can turn ‘Epic Shit’ into epic advertising and epic sales, it might just do it again.
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(But I’ll still keep buying Adidas.)
Apologies to Saul Steinberg for the drawing.