3 Lessons From Nike “Find Your Greatness Jogger” Ad

This is one of the most famous commercials ever produced by Nike.

It’s punchy, it’s powerful.

This ad is part of a campaign about greatness and how greatness is accessible, universal

The message in itself is not super original but the delivery in this ad is amazing.

I will show you why this commercial is so powerful and what we can learn from it as marketers.

Lesson #1: Use unexpected imagery

The imagery in this ad is very far from the usual athletic imagery you find in sports goods commercials.

The ad shows a chubby young boy running painfully on what seems to be a country road.

So we’re not watching an athlete perform but a boy.

And we are far away from any athletic environment.

He is not running in a stadium but on a road.

And he is not breaking some world record, he is just jogging (barely).

Think about the usual ad you see from sports goods companies (including Nike) and how unexpected this one is.

The guy doing the voice-over says it himself:

“Greatness. It’s just something we made up”.

This is a brand-new portrayal of athletic greatness can be.

And it’s punchy.

If you want to innovate, use imagery radically opposed to industry standards.

Take the risk to chock. It’s a risk but it could pay off big time.

Lesson #2: Use well-known & powerful symbols

For the first 25 seconds of this commercial, you don’t understand what you’re seeing exactly.

The commercial is 1-minute long, so for a quarter of that time, you just see a big empty road and at the end of that road a tiny shape that seems to be getting closer.