Nike walked straight into the increasingly tense intersection of sports, business and politics with the Sunday morning launch of a spendy ad campaign calling for racial equity and inclusiveness.
“Opportunity should be indiscriminate, worth should outshine color, the ball should bounce the same for everyone,” reads the Nike message that ran in large multi-page ads in The Oregonian and several other major U.S. newspapers.
Wieden+Kennedy, Nike’s longtime ad agency, helped prepare the campaign.
It’s not entirely clear what prompted the new messaging, which is scheduled to include the airing of an original short film at Sunday night’s Grammy Awards.
Was it the November election of Donald Trump? The series of police shootings of young black men that spawned the Black Lives Matter movement and widespread protests?
The Beaverton-area company preferred to let the ads speak for themselves. Nike is “encouraging people to take the respect and fairness they see on the field and translate it off the field,” the company said in a written statement.
Nike said it would donate $5 million this year to organizations that promote equality.
The athletic footwear and apparel industry has been buffeted by politics in recent weeks.
Under Armour has found itself under fire from its own athletes after chief executive Kevin Plank publicly endorsed Donald Trump as an “asset” to the nation.
NBA star Steph Curry, the brand’s most prominent athlete, famously quipped afterward that he agreed with Plank, but that he would remove the “e” and “t” from the word.
It was surely not what the company needed after its stock lost 20 percent of its value in a single day after a disappointing quarterly earnings report.
Both Nike and Adidas went public last month with calls for inclusiveness after Trump’s controversial executive order banning visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries.
The entire industry has mobilized to fight House Republicans’ tax reform plan, which would institute a large new tax on imports.
— Jeff Manning
503-294-7606, jmanning@oregonian.com
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
