Nike’s Air Max sneaker has gained a cult following among millennials since its debut in 1987 but, 34 years later, the brand faces a challenge: How do you make the shoe relevant to a younger generation?
Nike’s answer was to head to the metaverse and enlist kids to create a digital world centered around the Air Max.
Each year on March 26, the brand holds Air Max Day, a celebration of the iconic sneaker. Since Nike is releasing the first Air Max shoe just for kids, it decided to give creative control of its annual campaign to the product’s target audience.
The result is Airtopia, a magical world for kids that will take over Nikeland, the brand’s virtual environment that launched last year on digital platform Roblox.
To start, Nike asked three child creatives from the Play Council—its kids’ advisory board—to imagine what could be inside the Air Max bubble.
Twelve-year-old illustrator Joe Whale, aka “The Doodle Boy;” 11-year-old drummer and artist Nandi Bushell; and 14-year-old skater Rayssa Leal, who won a silver medal in women’s street skateboarding at the 2020 Summer Olympics, each made a piece of art, music or movement inspired by the air bubble.
Nike then translated the kids’ physical creations into elements for the digital environment. Other children who enter Nikeland can collaborate on building Airtopia by voting on which elements will go into the virtual world.
Airtopia includes “Air-lien” characters (air aliens), a crashed spaceship, a new feature called “Jump Jump Jump” and a virtual pet store.
AnalogFolk Amsterdam, the lead agency on this year’s global Nike Kids Air Max Day, developed the core concept, strategy and hero content for the “Magic is in the Air” campaign alongside design studio Man vs Machine with animation by Meister.
The inspiration for the campaign came from the insight that “Gen A spends more time in the metaverse than any generation before them. Yet they typically have no say in the spaces where they play,” the agency said in a LinkedIn post.
The campaign will run for three weeks initially across Nike’s online and social channels, out-of-home sites and in retail locations around the world.
CREDITS:
Client: Nike
Agency: AnalogFolk Amsterdam
Executive Creative Director: Carren O’Keefe
Strategy Director: Pierre-Axel Pejouan
Senior Strategist: Sofia Bodger
Creative Director: Tobias Snäll
Creative Team: Jake Kedge Kaz Salemink
Designer: Billy Dupée
Business Lead: Roddy Taylor
Agency Producer: Christina Musso
Media Buying Agency: Mindshare
Production Company: Ground Work
Director: Claire Arnold
Editor: Assembly Rooms
Producer: Scarlett Barclay
Post-Production Company: Black Kite
Audio Post-Production Company: OPM
Animation: MeisteR
Design: Man vs Machine
