A rare Olympic pin is “viraling” its way around the internet, fast becoming one of the more talked about and desirable objects on Earth—playfully featuring the Olympic rings as smoke clouds puffed from the mouth of the world’s most famous proudly weed-smoking rapper and beloved NBC commentator for the Paris Olympics: Snoop Dogg. The irony, of course, is that it’s safely assumed to be smoke from a substance banned at the Olympics. But, because it’s Snoop, it’s all good—there’s no moral fuss (nor should there be!) because everyone is too busy wondering why the Olympics and Snoop Dogg are a brand-match made in heaven … and why he’s become one of the most sought-after brand ambassadors of all time for all manner of brands. The BIC spot, dubbed “Lit Games,” comes from Doner, aiming to keep the fires burning on the most successful celeb collaboration in the brand’s history. Snoop Dogg Gives Martha Stewart ’10 Out of 10′ for Her Lighter Skills in BIC Ad Why Snoop plays well with others Snoop has endorsed a staggering 43 brands since his first ’90s collaboration with Stüssy. Add in the seven brands he owns and promotes, and that brings the count to 50. The range and caliber of brands Snoop “fits” with—Dunkin’, Corona, Klarna, Gucci—defy the laws of marketing gravity. Teach us, Doggfather! He’s always known success. In 1993, Snoop’s Dr. Dre-produced album Doggystyle became the best-selling global album in its first week. Its hit single got an entire generation to throw their hands in the air and wave them like they just don’t care, and millennials never stopped. When I was a teen in LA, no matter the zip code of your house party or prom, you heard Snoop and followed suit—he was viral way before it was a quotidian verb. But don’t be fooled that nostalgia alone is driving Snoop’s latest swell; Snoop has always known his worth as a unifying icon. According to Death Row Records (which he bought in 2022): he was “a perfect blend of street, cool and fun, a combination that appeals to a universal audience. He wasn’t viewed as menacing or anti-white like other gangster rappers … Snoop Dogg was just cool.” Universally cool. And straight-up. Snoop “keeps his mind on his money and his money on his mind”—he is explicit about his ambitions and talks transparently about business and brand deals. He confessed to Tiffany Haddish that he yessed a few endorsements “just for the money,” and this honesty and hustling of corporate America is respected by marketing-savvy millennials and Gen Z. And consistent. Snoop’s style and vibe have been true since day one—his laid-back SoCal attitude, rhyming reactions, and interest in diverse music and people. Snoop embodies the best practices of a brand—he never strays from this core and helps people connect the dots. Snoop told Jimmy Fallon his Olympics tracksuit was “not an NBC thing, it’s an LBC thing,” citing his Long Beach roots while linking them to the brand he’s promoting, artfully making his endorsement feel smooth and legit. Snoop endorsements guarantee boosts of attention and, when done right, sales, so it makes sense that so many brands are game to try. The best-performing brands follow Snoop’s lead and link product truths to his core equities, like Skechers, which saw a record $2 billion in sales following his Super Bowl ad with Martha Stewart. Others, like Solo Stove, lead with product and add a wink of Snoop, ultimately seeing an attention uptick but less sales impact. Why? Likely because it feels like an attempted growth shortcut, not a thing Snoop is dropping like it’s hot. Culture-fit for the Olympics Like all nations, the U.S. brings its best of the best to the Olympics, each with a story of realized dreams. Two archetypal ways to “make it” in America appear: “rugged individualism,” where you have the grit to pick yourself up by your bootstraps no matter what; and “be a yes man” (or woman), where you seize and make the most of every chance you encounter, trusting one might yield gold and glory. Snoop’s story is a rare alchemy of these archetypes and a balancing act of seemingly opposite ways of being. He is totally chill and prolifically hard-working. He’s playful (even giggly) and serious about what matters; he thanks himself and constantly dishes respect to fellow strivers, artists and elders. Snoop speaks often and pridefully of his lawless gangster youth and, fully aware his path was lucky, creates different possibilities for youth like him today. Snoop is always true to himself and unafraid to reinvent himself—he loves trying and building new things, and his humor is disarming. In America’s most divisive era, this ethos and attitude brings timely, refreshing Zen to the airwaves. Especially in an election year when brands avoid sides, Snoop reaches and catalyzes people across demographics and generations—an ultimate unifier. What Snoop likes, does and buys is something everyone can feel chill liking, doing and buying. So, what better place than Paris’ world stage to promote a fun-loving, cool flavor of American patriotism that inspires common ground? And who better than Snoop—wrapped in an American flag shedding genuine tears during the national anthem—to deliver the message? No one. According to Snoop: “The Olympics brings everybody together, all countries together, all people together—yes, through competition, but peace and love and unity is the end goal.”

With its Paris 2024 Olympics campaign, Nike is fighting to reverse its brand decline

In 2021, then-Nike senior brand director Massimo Giunco was baffled to hear online fashion retailer ASOS come up repeatedly in meetings.

Giunco, who left Nike in June 2022 after 22 years there, had been in internal conversations in which Nike staffers suggested they meet with ASOS to borrow its digital tactics, he told ADWEEK.

These conversations made him uneasy because this wasn’t the Nike he’d long known: a brand with a gut instinct for groundbreaking creativity and emotional storytelling that inspired generations of consumers.

Mimicking ecommerce businesses had become a fixation among some Nike employees under current CEO John Donahoe, said Giunco. Another former staffer and agency partners who spoke with ADWEEK echoed Giunco’s assessment. Donahoe was a former eBay CEO and management consultant who joined Nike in January 2020, where he doubled down on a strategy to cut ties with many wholesale retailers and grow revenue from direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales.

“There was this shift in attention to any digital player while neglecting the great things we were doing,” Giunco told ADWEEK.

The strategy initially seemed to work.

According to Kantar’s BrandZ rankings, which determine brand value using financial data and consumer research, Nike’s brand value more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, rising from $49.9 billion to $109.6 billion amid a pandemic fitness boom.

But post-pandemic, it has slid back down to $71.6 billion.

Nike’s June 2024 earnings report was a disaster, sending shares tanking 23% after it revealed its revenue dipped 2% to $12.6 billion in Q4, its direct business fell by 7% and digital was down by 10%. Nike also expected sales to drop 10% this quarter.

Nike has already laid off 740 staff at its Beaverton, Ore., headquarters in 2024, including vice presidents across its marketing, technology and innovation teams—all in service of a cost-cutting plan to reduce its workforce by 2% by 2025.

Yet, Nike is also investing more than ever in this year’s Olympic Games, unleashing a global campaign to reset and regain its swagger.

Nike has a lot riding on how it shows up at the Olympic Games Paris 2024. It must revive sluggish sales and restore its declining brand value as competitors like Adidas and upstart apparel company On try to snatch market share.

The star ambassadors that defined its golden age, like Serena Williams and Tiger Woods, have either retired from their sports or moved on from Nike. And while Nike has signed new partners like WNBA star Caitlin Clark, competitors are also proving adept at forging partnerships with the next generation of star athletes. Adidas has English soccer star Jude Bellingham, and On has a deal with the world’s No. 1 women’s singles tennis player, Iga Natalia Świątek.

“There’s been a generational shift that hasn’t been kind to Nike,” a former senior Nike employee said. “A lot of generational talent of 2024 are not wearing the swoosh.”

ADWEEK spoke with six people who are either former Nike executives or worked closely with the brand, as well as other marketing experts, to paint a picture of how Nike can regain the edge that defined its brand for so long.

A complete marketing transformation 

Nike, which appointed Nicole Hubbard Graham as CMO earlier this year, has further transformed its marketing division to support a major strategy shift.

The company has confirmed with ADWEEK that it is once again separating its design and storytelling units, which had merged in 2020. This underscores how brand storytelling has again become a singular focus for Nike.

Nike has also confirmed it has brought back Enrico Balleri to its world headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., as vice president and creative director of global brand voice to elevate its storytelling. Balleri is a 20-year Nike marketing maverick who oversaw lauded campaigns including “Write the Future” for the 2010 World Cup. But since 2021, after Nike’s digital-first pivot, he’d been in a regional job in Milan, Italy, sources said.

Starting the race 

Nike’s new Olympics campaign marks a major shift in attitude, marketing experts say. The spot depicts elite athletes in the height of competition, against actor Willem Dafoe’s voiceover: “I’m single-minded. I’m deceptive. I’m obsessive. I’m selfish. Does that make me a bad person?” The ad ends with a tagline in bright red font, which was also controversial because it extols victory over decorum: “Winning isn’t for everyone.”

“It has the kind of edge, attitude, and distinctiveness that should be applauded,” said Richard Exon, founder of independent creative agency Joint, who does not work for Nike but has worked with clients including Amazon and formerly Land Rover while CEO of RKCR/Y&R.

“It also acts as a galvanizing rallying cry for how Nike thinks innovation, pace and ambition can get the brand back out ahead of the competition.”

System1, which uses a so-called Star rating to predict brand growth based on an ad’s creative, gave Nike’s Olympics spot a 1.5 out of a maximum 5.9 among the general public, but among sports fans it scored a 3.8.

“Nike spotlights endurance and personal challenge, which appeals to some but not all,” explained System1 chief customer officer Jon Evans.

Nike still has a long road ahead to regain its stature as a brand whose marketing has a point of view.

“It won’t happen overnight,” an agency leader who works with Nike told ADWEEK.

Much of what Nike needs to do to reverse its slide goes beyond its marketing messages. For instance, the company has already backpedaled on its decision to sever relationships with retailers like Foot Locker, Macy’s and DSW in favor of its ecommerce channels.

However, those decisions also impacted Nike’s marketing strategy, according to former Nike marketers as well as current and past agency partners. When Nike wanted digital sales to represent 50% of revenue by 2022, it invested in performance marketing and programmatic ads to drive traffic to Nike.com and its apps, cutting into resources that were once allocated for brand marketing.

“Nike became a machine to produce content to feed this digital ecosystem. It was all resources that took away from brand-building,” Giunco told ADWEEK. “The main objective was to drive people to Nike.com, not to resonate with or inspire people to play sport.”

To do this, Nike invested in programmatic ads and performance marketing at “double or more of the share of resources usually invested in the other brand activities,” Giunco would later post on LinkedIn.

To support these initiatives, Nike began producing more content that would engage members and collect data. For example, it released Mind Sets in 2021, a content series for the Training Club and Running Club apps that offered guidance about the intersection of fitness and mental health. This year, Nike’s “Mindset Tips” site has published two articles so far, compared to 13 in 2022.

Nike now seems keen to reverse these decisions, too. The company said in its last earnings call that it would reinvest $1 billion in consumer-facing activities in fiscal 2025, including sports marketing, increased design resources, in-store activations and “bigger, bolder” brand campaigns.

Can Nike just do it? 

To be sure, Nike never completely abandoned brand marketing—its 2023 Women’s World Cup ads and a 2024 UEFA Euro spot are both recent examples.

But with the erosion of brand marketing resources, its big brand campaigns over the last few years weren’t integrated well across channels, Giunco said.

For instance, when it created online content targeting micro-communities with local influencers, such as a 2021 digital series about Berlin teenagers, Nike made Instagram posts but didn’t adequately push that creative across the digital ecosystem, Giunco observed. Soursop, the agency that created the Berlin series, declined to comment.

By contrast, Nike’s 2018 campaign “Nothing Beats a Londoner,” which was also for a local market, got much more support. It took 14 months to make the ad and drew from months of deep research, said Mark Shanley, former creative director at Nike’s agency Wieden+Kennedy London and now a CD at adam&eveDDB.

Nike’s top execs in Portland were initially reluctant to accept the ad, Shanley recalled. “It looked more like a music video for a London artist,” he said.

But they eventually did, and Nike supported it with a robust social media strategy. “Londoner” debuted across the Instagram channels of the more than 250 young athletes who appeared in the ad. After the launch, searches in London for Nike products reportedly went up by 93%, while U.K. searches increased by 54%.

That same year, Nike also built a famous campaign around former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who’d been blackballed by the NFL following his protesting police violence against Black communities. The campaign debuted first on Twitter (now called X), with a post on Kaepernick’s account.

Following the Kaepernick partnership, Nike’s income jumped by 10% to $847 million in the quarter the ad was released.

Beyond the business results, the Kaepernick-led campaign was a point of pride internally.

One agency executive who works with Nike, but did not work on the Kaepernick campaign, felt it represented the “peak of Nike confidence.”

Competitors closing in 

If Nike doesn’t return to developing the bold, culture-defining creative that characterized its brand, competitors like Adidas have already shown they will.

For instance, Adidas’ UEFA Euro 2024 campaign featured English soccer star Bellingham and a cover of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” The ad captured the mood of the nation and went viral ahead of England entering the final.

System1 gave Adidas’ Euros spot a 3.8 Star rating out of 5. By comparison, Nike’s Euro 2024 ad, which depicted the “madness” of soccer players, scored 2.7.

And Adidas’ TV ads this year also outperformed Nike’s ads by 23%, according to the TV measurement firm EDO, which uses signals like online search activity and website visits to determine how effective an ad was.

“Now everyone’s caught up [to Nike] and everything looks the same,” Shanley said.

The Olympics marketing sprint will show if Nike can start to reclaim some of its old magic, but the company is ultimately running a marathon.

“It’s a cultural shift that needs to happen again,” the former Nike employee said. “Nike would do well to recapture its underdog spirit, its soul of overcoming odds, celebrating human potential and courage.”