Nike is returning to the Super Bowl after 27 years with a spot celebrating women athletes who break barriers.
Women athletes are told they can’t be bold, make demands, break records or stand out in Nike’s Super Bowl spot, which features star athletes including Sha’Carri Richardson, Caitlin Clark, Jordan Chiles and Sabrina Ionescu, among others.
They do it anyway.
The 60-second spot, titled “So Win,” is set to debut during the Super Bowl tonight.
It highlights the outstanding rise of women athletes across all areas of sport, despite constant efforts to impose barriers and ceilings against them. Directed by Kim Gehrig and led creatively by Wieden+Kennedy Portland, the black-and-white film captures Chiles, Clark, Richardson, A’ja Wilson, Sophia Wilson (formerly Smith) and several of their contemporaries from Nike’s roster blocking out the negative and letting their hard work speak for itself.
Grammy-award-winning rapper Doechii narrates, reciting a series of things women athletes are told they can’t do, such as “have attitude,” or “stand out.” Finally, when the athletes are told they can’t win, they silence the naysayers and win.
The spot will mark Nike’s return to the Super Bowl for the first time in 27 years. The athletic apparel brand last advertised in the Big Game in 1998. Ad Age on Feb. 6 first reported about Nike’s return to the game.
It comes as women’s sports have enjoyed a meteoric rise, with female athletes breaking records in nearly all franchises, said Nicole Hubbard, chief marketing officer at Nike.
“[At Nike], we have this timeless athlete insight of [both men and women] telling us they face being counted out, being the underdog or being told you can’t be something, and in many cases, telling yourself you can’t be something,” Hubbard told Ad Age in an interview.
“It felt like the right message to bring out to the world, to remind athletes and people in general, that you are what you tell yourself. If you let society tell you who you’re going to be, you’re going to become that. These female athletes are breaking every barrier possible. They’re filling stadiums … they’re driving ticket sales and they’re commanding salaries that they’ve never commanded before.”
The spot is part of a larger campaign that includes athlete extensions, still photography and social media posts. Minimalist still portraits of the athletes capture them in both athletic and fashion apparel, styled by Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, as they pose for “power shots.”
The campaign is a splash for Nike, which has skipped the Super Bowl for nearly three decades.
Hubbard said the decision to return was largely influenced by the fact that there are “very few shared cultural moments anymore,” and that Nike wants to show up in both “the biggest sport moments and the smallest sport moments.”
Before its 27-year hiatus, Nike was a regular Super Bowl advertiser, consistently delivering ads with longtime creative partner Wieden+Kennedy, Ad Age senior reporter Adrianne Pasquarelli notes.
Nike’s 1992 commercial “Hare,” which featured Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny, is lauded as one of the most memorable of all time, while its 1997 “Super Bowl Party” featured celebrities including Tyra Banks, Spike Lee, Stevie Wonder and Chris Rock as a puppet.
Nike’s last Super Bowl appearance occurred in 1998, when it caused a stir with a spot that ditched clothes for bare skin. The 60-second ad featured basketball player David Robinson and Olympic runners Michael Johnson and Suzy Hamilton, working out, running or otherwise playing their sport naked.
Now, its return to the Big Game comes as Nike seeks to reverse sales struggles amid increased competition.
Recently, the brand launched a series of campaigns backed by striking creative to drive sales, all focused on winning. In July, the brand’s Olympics campaign narrated by Willem Dafoe and featuring longtime stars such as LeBron James and Serena Williams, made the bold assertion that winning is an exclusive art that is not for everyone.
A subsequent running campaign launched in September emphasized the challenge of running in any conditions, asserting that “Winning Isn’t Comfortable.”
The current Super Bowl campaign follows a similar line of thinking, celebrating the grit it takes to win and empowering women athletes who fight against the odds to become winners, explained Hubbard.
“In talking [with the athletes], they felt like, from a societal perspective, winning was getting a losing reputation, and that this idea of being obsessive, being all in on something, being maniacal, going after your goals with a single-minded focus, was becoming a little taboo in society. It felt like our athletes felt that they have this drive in them that isn’t being celebrated in society anymore. That was the impetus of the Olympics campaign,” she told Ad Age. “Winning is so personal, and winning doesn’t have to have one face. It has many different faces. So, this idea of continuing to dimensionalize winning feels like a nice space for us right now.”
Nike’s recent marketing efforts seem to unlock a new era of creativity for the brand and for Wieden+Kennedy, especially around women’s sports, as made evident by its choice to focus on women in an ad airing during a male-dominated game for a male-dominated league.
It’s not unusual for Nike, which has a reputation for courting controversy with advertising. The brand has been praised as one of the earlier athletic brands to bring to light the barriers and lack of access faced by women in sports.
In 1995, for instance, a Nike ad written and produced by women called “If You Let Me Play Sports” featured young girls describing how sports can make their lives better and quoting statistics about healthier lives with less depression, less chance of unplanned pregnancy and a greater probability that they would leave an abusive partner.
At the time, the national secretary of the National Organization for Women, Karen Johnson, called it significant. However, the praise has also come with a checkered past and criticism of the brand’s own treatment of women athletes, which has at times been at odds with its public messaging.
In 2019, Nike came under fire when Olympic gold-winning athlete Allyson Felix revealed in the New York Times that the brand offered her 70% less money in her contract negotiations after she faced a high-risk pregnancy, causing other women to come forward and share their own stories.
The brand later rolled out pregnancy protections for athletes following public outcry and a congressional inquiry.
But this time, all of that is behind the brand, and Nike plans to put its best foot forward for all athletes, Hubbard told Ad Age, asserting that “Nike has one of the longest-standing histories of supporting and working with female athletes.”
“Our commitment and our desire to be the best partners possible for both male and female athletes is unconditional. LeBron James is just as important as Caitlin Clark as A’ja Wilson as Sabrina Ionescu. Using female athletes [for this ad] in this moment was just giving them the respect that they deserve, which is that they’re the best athletes on the planet right now,” said Hubbard. “Every single athlete that is in that ad, in this moment, is an MVP, a world champion, a gold medalist. They are the creme de la creme, and they are the most iconic athletes on the planet.”
