Here’s an interesting thing that’s easy to forget about Nike’s consistently excellent anthemic brand films: they always feature the exact same content - people playing sports. And, as many brands out there trying (and failing) to out-Nike Nike with their own anthemic montages of sports can tell you, sport footage alone does not an anthem make.
So how does Nike take the same basic content, and make it not just fresh but talkworthy, time after time after time? The answer is simple but extremely difficult: cultural resonance. Here’s a look at a handful of anthems done for local markets, along with the insights that drive them, which should show you what I mean by cultural resonance and might act as inspiration for anyone who wants to (or has to) tell a story using overused content: e.g. people using the brand’s product or participating in the brand’s main activity.
Songs
These are the most obvious of the bunch.
In Japan, they took a Japanese school pledge and twisted it: Just Do It Japan
In Russia, they took a classic Russian children’s song and twisted that: What are girls made of?
In India, they created an original song and made a music video with a Bollywood vibe: Dada Ding
Sayings
These are smarter.
In the Middle East, they twisted a phrase that every Arab girl has apparently heard a thousand times growing up: What will they say about you?
In China, Nike realised that because of the one child policy, kids were being treated like they were made of glass and called “Precious”, so they did this: Don’t Call Me Precious
Intangibles
This one takes the cake. (And it drives me crazy because I was working on this same project at R/GA while W+K was smashing this out of the park.) The insight that Londoners can’t be stopped is solid. But it’s the narrative device that makes this a work of art. First of all, it’s done in-camera which already makes it ten times better than straight VO. But more importantly, the mechanism they use to drive the story forward gets deep under the skin of a city’s youth culture - not just the content, but the storytelling device itself.
There are two things that characterise specifically young Londoners more than anything else: arrogant one-upmanship and “having a whinge” (complaining). They took those two defining characteristics - things every young Londoner would recognise in their friends and themselves - and turned them into this: Nothing Beats a Londoner.
When taken altogether, these spots for local markets teach a valuable lesson about how to choose a storytelling device: not just because it’s cute or clever, but because it will resonate with a particular culture. This may seem obvious but, honestly: when’s the last time you asked yourself if your storytelling device - not the content, but the narrative structure itself - would resonate with your audience more than another?