CASE STUDY: Nike 'The Last Game'

Challenge: The FIFA World Cup is not only a sports events, but a branding war to brands. Brands, especially sports brands, fight for substantial exposure to stand out among their competitors. Nike is not an exception. Facing its head-to-head competitor, adidas, who is an official partner of the game, Nike was initially disadvantage with less publicity. To get rid of the situation and win at the branding war, Nike created a five-minute animated short film featuring international soccer stars. The Last Game aimed to create buzz and hype the audience up for the FIFA World Cup.Strategy: Advertising campaigns featuring a video can be executed in two ways: Instant video and “tap-to-video” from a display ad. However, both ways are not favourable to Nike because of the reasons below. A five-minute video is too long for showing with instant video. It would cause a heavy loading and long loading time. Moreover, from our insights collected from past instant video ads, 80% of the audience drops off in 20 seconds, therefore, instant video was not feasible for The Last Game. Tap-to-video from a display ad works best with campaigns that are a strong call-to-action, otherwise, it is not attractive for audiences to tap on the ad and obstruct their original thought of opening the app. Hence, we turned the focus onto the short film itself and thought of ways to implant the film with content and the best platform to go on was, with no doubt, Hong Kong Movie.Execution: Nike’s The Last Game was showing the same way with all other movies in the app, by listing at the third place of “In Theatres”. When users tapped on the ad, they would be directed to a detailed page about the movie The Last Game with a synopsis. They could watch the entire microfilm and share it via social media channels. We had also tailor-made a “know more” button for users who were interested in the campaign, which served as a hyperlink to a landing page of the campaign showing some product information.[gallery link="file" ids="89651,89650,89649,89648"]Results: After the two-week campaign, there were more than 103,000 Hong Kong Movie users who showed interest in Nike’s The Last Game and tapped to view the details of the microfilm.