Even though Nike Canada no longer sells ice skates, it wants to be associated with Canada’s game.
During the IIHF World Junior Hockey Championship, it leveraged an American-made ad to create a Canadian-made web blitz with help from Organic‘s Toronto office.
As part of its "Force Fate” campaign, Nike debuted its "Deny Destiny” television ad during the World Juniors. The spot, created by Portland, Ore.-based Wieden + Kennedy, showed Canadian hockey stars Jarome Iginla, Jayna Hefford and Dion Phaneuf training and explaining that it was hard work, not "destiny,” that brought success.
While still running on TV, the ad also resides at NikeTraining.ca, one of the brand’s three Canadian web destinations. For the World Juniors, Organic redesigned the site for an online hockey-focused campaign that included Facebook, Twitter and YouTube components.
"It was our job to bring that Destiny television ad to life online,” said Elliott Smith, creative director at Organic. "The World Juniors is about the closest thing Canada has to March Madness,” the college basketball playoff season in the U.S. "It appeals to a slightly younger demo than the NHL does, so we wanted a strategy that would keep a continuous dialogue going with this younger demo.”
To build on the W+K ad, Organic shot interviews with the hockey stars and linked this new material to the original footage. As viewers watch the original ad online, they can click on timeline markers that pause the ad and launch video of one-on-one interviews with the players.
Nike also hired hockey blogger and YouTube personality Steve "Dangle” Glynn as a correspondent, sending him to Saskatoon to cover the hockey tournament. His video blog posts appeared on the site alongside photos, Twitter posts and event coverage.
According to Smith, NikeTraining.ca is meant to be just one part of visitors’ online experience, rather than the hub. Comments for the videos are duplicated on Facebook, because that’s where the target market "lives and breathes every day.”
Smith said Nike has been moving towards dialogue-based communications and away from static campaign concepts. "They call it an evolution from tsunamis to waves,” he said.
Organic is now preparing to transform the site again to focus on the Winter Olympics in February. While HBC is the official outfitter for the Canadian Olympic team, Nike Canada is the official supplier of "high performance sporting goods” for the Games including the jerseys for the hockey teams.
