Nike’s “Just Do It 30th Anniversary: Dream Crazy”: short film intertextuality in modern advertising.

“Just Do It.” The phrase has become integral to the campaigns of sports brand Nike and is immediately recognisable in today’s media as an iconic slogan. Though the imperative phrase is commonplace in any English speaker’s motivational (or nagging parents’) lexicon, its association with Nike is now being celebrated for its 30-year run – and is still going strong. The advertisement that Nike released for their 30th sloganniversary takes the use of the direct address from speaker to listener – author to audience – to a new level in borrowing the oratory of Colin Kaepernick in order to portray a convincing deliberative rhetoric. In this essay, I explore how advertising in the modern era requires more than persuasive language, sexual imagery, and direct imperatives; I believe it needs the rhetoric of cultural discourse to make a lasting mark in the mind of the contemporary consumer. The identity of the consumer hence directs the brand’s chosen social justice platform. Now, it commands the attention of those who “Dream Crazy.”

Reviewing the Literature

In researching the imperative tone advertisers employ in both classic and modern advertising strategy, I have found that is impossible to analyse media texts in a Trump-and-post-Trump Western era without acknowledging the socio-political context that advertisements now utilise to engage a youthful target audience. Even in Pakistan and India, endorsement and sexual appeal are not enough to retain the attention economy in contemporary listeners (R. Zaman, et al., 2015). With imperative and rhetoric as Nike’s primary marketing tactics, it rings clear that the new communicative purpose of a television or video advertisement employing any form of narrative is going to feature an inspirational attempt to comment on the political atmosphere (Philippova, 2020). For example, Gillette Razor’s “We Believe” campaign (Graf, 2019), which followed in the footsteps of the “Dream Crazy” campaign by enacting the public service announcement imitative narrative multitextual approach, with the combination of powerful language and refusing to waver from the imperative mood. Free of apologetics for the cause behind which the marketing disguises itself, the listener is personally engaged and hence more easily persuaded – the primary goal of any advertisement (Sparks, 2005:22 – 507-525).

Advertising discourse in the contemporary era has been redefining itself to distinguish a brand as politically aware, allowing for a transition from economic industrialisation in historic advertising approaches, to providing a cultural discourse with a representational experience of rhetoric for the consumer. It is through this distinctive practice that “advertising is able to achieve its most significant qualitative effects: the constitution of cultural communities to replace those which capitalism has destroyed, and which provide people with needs and values” (Fairciough, 2013:165-166). In its devisive nature, corporate political advocacy inevitably alienates a number of its consumer base, but it is not a modern notion in the industry (Review, 1988:41-55) that it is effective in marketing to take a stance on the contemporary political landscape. This effectiveness relies heavily on the animator of the message, and the influence they have over the addressees – and, of course, whether the principal strikes true to a wider audience who are willing to decode the encoded message portrayed by Nike. “They may accept the dominant position of the producer, which is grounded in a hegemonial ideological order, or they may take a negotiated position or reinterpret it in an oppositional way.” (Hoffman et al., 2020:163) And so there is very little risk associated – as boycotts are outdone by buycotts when promoted by corporate political advocacy in an ever more partisan contemporary landscape.

Methods of Analysing Advertising

In order to capture the attention of any audience – the commodity here being the marketability of virality through the imperative tone used to encode a political ideology to the target audience and inspire a deontic mood – advertisers in modernity utilise a more updated form of the imperative and rhetoric tone, to portray the aforementioned corporate political advocacy. The intention relies on context in the case of Dream Crazy and its endorsement by Colin Kaepernick, and with the cotext of the printed photograph (and its communication to the audience via a tweet on Kaepernick’s Twitter account), it is clearly an advertisement aimed at a specific audience: those who would already take interest in the career and presupposed ideologies of the athlete.

When a celebrity becomes the animator of a narrative instead of a faceless brand or icon (such as Nike’s ‘swoosh’ logo), the effect on the audience changes – from the ratified and unratified listener, it can be polarising depending on the foreknowledge a community of listeners have about the endorser. The power a celebrity has hence heavily influences the tone of the message and how it is decoded by addressees.

It is also of import to analyse the personal pronoun usage, the use of second-person address in the imperative, and the use of rhetoric; and the reaction of an audience to the power employed by the editors and Kaepernick’s delivery – how is it that this is an effective tool? Because of narrative (Escalas, 1998).

Analysing: Dream Crazy

There are miniature narrative arcs inside each of the lines within the advert transcript: A discouragement of a negative, “Don’t try to be the fastest runner in the school”, as an expectation we might set for ourselves, but then a second act that subverts the expectation, “Or the fastest in the world”; instead, it provides a superlative beyond the narrative expectation and pushes it even further to the edge with “Be the fastest ever” as a deontic imperative. This repeats through many examples, each one providing a narrative in such a short space of time that it retains the attention while allowing an immediate decoding process for the listener: and hence the ability to share before even having finished watching the full video.

Semantic features of the imperative used in both textual and video advertising discourse includes the most obvious: the personal second-person pronoun of “you”. This induces the addressee into a one-to-one role with the animator and creates a mood of action (Sparks, 2005:507-525). The audience feels the requirement to act upon the authority of the principal core message – hence why Nike employed its animator to be Colin Kaepernick; he “[believed] in something”. The context of this statement is presupposed to be the anchor of the campaign (Barthes, 1977) (Jones et al., 2020); common knowledge in the cultural psyche here being Kaepernick taking a knee for the national anthem to protest police brutality against the black communities of the USA. And, for doing this, he was not re-signed for an NFL contract due to the controversy – he “sacrificed everything” (Hoffman et al., 2020).

Personalisation of the imperative follows throughout the campaign, with the conversational tone of the narrative, as if the addressee were able to respond. Made more personal by the preface of the extreme-close-up photograph of Kaepernick, with the former quote accompanied by the Nike slogan “Just Do It” creates a cotext that allows for further depth of interpersonal relations between the addressee and Kaepernick (even the presentation that it is a black-and-white photograph, creating a sense of seriousness and historical context). Celebrity endorsement by a controversial figure with distinctive morals is proving more effective in contemporary advertising with younger audiences, hence the involvement of Kaepernick helps to identify more implicitly the target audience of Nike’s Dream Crazy adverts: the active, activist youth. (R. Zaman, et al., 2015)

The context hence allows the rhetoric tone of the advert to come across as less patronising and more urgent – not from a place of power, despite the powerful speaker – but a place of interpersonal relations and a requisition to act with immediacy (whether that be buying or burning Nike products). There is a classic rhetorical question at once in the video advert, “If people say your dreams are crazy—if they laugh at what you think you can do?” and then answers for the addressee. “Good. Stay that way.” The question in of itself is the conditional, a deontic mood where the if can easily be interpreted as “if only”—if you’re like me. If you’re unique. If you’re different. The persuasive nature comes out as a call to arms for the corporate political advocating that Nike intends to portray. “Ask if [your dreams] are crazy enough” being the final line brings the advert to a conclusion for the addressee and creates an over-arching narrative to capture and then keep the attention of a contemporary audience; the short, personal pronoun packed sentences are repetitive in order to ring off those mini-narrative arcs, so that any overhearer may be able to share the content, but connects them via the repetition of the theme of dreaming, and acting on those dreams.

The level of virality this creates becomes marketability; it ensures the attention economy value of the advert, despite it being a whole 2 minutes long, and two days separate from its initial cotextual ‘teaser’ of the tweet on social media by Kaepernick to the release of the video advertisement on YouTube.com and USA national television. The latter of these two visual channels of communication provides space for the existence of the overhearer, the unratified listener, to whom the negative reactive decoding comes from. This is the source of the audience who may with the animator on a principal level and respond cynically to the rhetoric mood of the advert. This is beneficial in its own way, inducing the “boycott and buycott” reaction (almost always proving to be a positive for the advertiser’s purchasing power post-release) (Review, 1988; Hoffman et al., 2020), but whichever emotion is instigated, whether positive or negative, the emotional contagion (E. Hatfield et al., 1993) of the subject matter, and the powerful imperative mood provided by the context and Kaepernick, a discourse will be created on social media platforms. And that is exactly what makes controversial figures in promotions so powerful – the virality and shareability of a message, no matter the reaction from the listener (Jonah Berger, 2012).

Conclusion

By incorporating political discourse into the advertisement by utilising the reactive cultural power of the animator Kaepernick and inviting the addressee with little room to escape the imperative by ratifying anyone listening with the second person tense and interpersonal mood, Nike has used the classic imperative slogan marketing style of its former years, and the style used by so many corporations (Burger King’s “Have it your way”; Play Station’s “Live in your world, play in ours”; Sprite’s “Obey your thirst”, as a few examples of many), to redefine what advertising discourse means to contemporary consumers. Attention is the new economic currency, and to grasp it, the imperative and rhetoric must be utilised for a political cause to maintain relevance (Philippova, 2020).

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Citations & References

Barthes, R. (1977). Rhetoric of the Image. Fontana Press, 32-51.

E. Hatfield et al. (1993). Emotional Contagion. Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction, 1-6.

Escalas, J. E. (1998). Advertising Narratives: What Are They and How Do They Work? Representing Consumers: Voices, Views, and Visions, 267-289.

Fairciough, N. (2013). Language & Power. Taylor & Francis Group.

Graf, A. (2019). Fresh Writing. Retrieved from Fresh Writing - Notre Dame: https://freshwriting.nd.edu/volumes/2021/essays/why-gillette-s-we-believe-the-best-men-can-be-ad-is-not-a-vilification-of-all-men

Hoffman et al. (2020). The contingency of corporate political advocacy: Nike's "Dream Crazy" campaign with Colin Kaepernick. Sage Publications, 163.

Jonah Berger, K. M. (2012). What Makes Online Content Viral? Journal of Marketing Research.

Jones et al. (2020). Language and media : A resource book for students. Taylor & Francis Group.

Nike (Director). (2018). Dream Crazy [Motion Picture]. United States. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW2yKSt2C_A

Philippova, M. (2020). Advertising and The Imperative. https://www.academia.edu/.

R. Zaman, et al. (2015). Effect of Ethical Issues on Advertising Effectiveness. European Journal of Business and Management, 3-4.

Review, H. W. (1988). Corporate advocacy advertising and political influence. Public Relations Review (14), 41-55.

Sparks, C. A. (2005). Psychology & Marketing. https://doi.org/. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.20071