The Takeoff

The ask.

October 18, 1984 was the day that defined the Jordan brand. Michael Jordan faced down steep fines rather than sacrifice his style on the court, thus demonstrating the defiant energy that would go on to define the Jumpman for decades to come.

Nike came to my team for help building a campaign around this story. After the success of WNBA All-Star Weekend, they gave us the opportunity to craft a narrative that brought MJ's iconic defiance to today's audience.

The ideation.

Some of my writers hadn't experienced a creative brainstorm before. I was happy to change that.

I built out a digital workspace cut into four corners. One for each audience personality. Each with a prompt challenging the writers to spitball punchy lines that connected the October 18th story to that particular audience. It was an inspiring, hilarious, insightful, and sometimes unhinged experience. It also served as inspiration when creating our campaign concepts.

I distilled the energy from our brainstorm into overarching themes, potential headlines, and narratives for each concept. In the end, “Break the Rules” came out on top.

The work.

After the client sent over their enthusiastic yes, I put together a one-pager with messaging direction on how to translate our winning concept for each channel. From there we got into production. With the help of a talented writer, we created work for the Nike App, website, email, and text push notifications.