Advertising executive Dan Wieden of Wieden+Kennedy, part of the marketing team behind Nike’s famous “Just Do It” slogan, spoke with Dezeen magazine last month and described how he came up with arguably the most famous tag line in advertising history. It turns out he borrowed it from the last words of a convicted murderer.
“I was recalling a man in Portland,” Wieden told Dezeen, remembering how in 1988 he was struggling to come up with a line that would tie together a number of different TV commercials the fledgling agency had created for the sportswear brand.
“He grew up in Portland, and ran around doing criminal acts in the country, and was in Utah where he murdered a man and a woman, and was sent to jail and put before a firing squad. They asked him if he had any final thoughts and he said: ‘Let’s do it’. I didn’t like ‘Let’s do it’ so I just changed it to ‘Just do it’.”
The results were a hit almost immediately, but not before some hesitation by Nike’s co-founder Phil Knight, who initially rejected the idea of the Nike brand needing to be advertised. “We don’t need that sh*t,” Wieden recalled Knight saying at the time. “I said, ‘Just trust me on this one.’ So they trusted me, and it went big pretty quickly.”
The slogan was first used in a television commercial in 1988 and is still being used today, helping Nike become the worldwide leader in the manufacturing of sports apparel and equipment, as well as the 21st most valuable brand in the world according to Forbes.
Here is the commercial where the slogan was first used.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCJ7G-vY4vA
Is it me, or does it feel like that commercial could have aired for the first time yesterday? Aside from the cars in the background, it doesn’t feel dated in any other way. Unfortunately, however, it may be tough to get the visual of a man being killed by a firing squad out of my head the next time I see the words, “Just Do It.”
[Dezeen]
