Come on! Don’t stop now!" the snowboarder yells, his voice fading in the wind as he zooms down a frozen slope. Appropriately enough, this mountain adventure, a commercial for Nike’s Air Cross Trainer II, doesn’t stop, either. "Snowball," via Wieden & Kennedy (W&K), Portland, Ore., has a cliffhanger ending: a freeze-frame of a menacing, king-size snowball, rolling downhill toward the camera.
Where is it headed? From the television screen onto the Web—a leap made possible by the agency’s interactive producer, Katie Raye, who worked closely with the broadcast production team to create several Web-only endings for "Snowball," "Racing Marion," and "Celebrity Cruise." The spots lead viewers to whatever.nike.com, where they can view several different endings to each ad. "This campaign is the first of its kind, as far as we know," explains Raye.
All three spots are shot from the perspective of a participant in the action, so the viewer is the person who’s racing Olympic sprinter Marion Jones, schussing down the slopes with snowboarder Rob Kingwill, or enjoying a celebrity cruise with slugger Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals.
In "Snowball," the viewer attempts to mimic Kingwill, and finds the aforementioned snowball chasing him down the mountain. From there, the ad has four Web-only endings. When you enter the site, you click on the image of a karate expert, and hear someone yelling "Eeeee-yah!" The next step is a video clip of Kingwill, who has taken shelter in a ski lodge, looking straight into the camera and announcing, "Stand back—I’ll deal with this!" He steps out of frame and the sounds of a ferocious battle are heard. Using his snowboard as a weapon, Kingwill slices and dices the offending snowball until it’s a harmless but charming ice sculpture. Another ending has Kingwill, armed with a bow and arrow, leading you on a daring hunt for the snowball, which lumbers out of the bushes and flattens the snowboarder.
Though Raye and her interactive production team didn’t conceive the storylines, their input was essential in helping the director, Johan Renck of bicoastal Mars Media and Pettersson Ackerlund Renck (P.A.R.), Stockholm, tailor some of the TV images for the Web. One of the inspirations for the P.O.V. style, Raye says, was the music video "Smack My Bitch Up" for Prodigy. Directed by Jonas Ackerlund, also of P.A.R.—he’s handled in the U.S. by bicoastal HSI, the parent company to Mars—the controversial video put the viewer in the shoes of the song’s blustering, violent protagonist. W&K screened the clip for Nike to demonstrate how a P.O.V. spot could lend itself to multiple endings.
Raye’s contribution to the campaign began when she met with Vic Palumbo, the broadcast producer on the project. "The creative team had a total vision for the broadcast side," says Raye, "so we didn’t have input there. But they were shooting the endings which we would be digitizing, and we were going to be ripping some color out of the frames for the Internet, so we all coordinated schedules and went to pre-production meetings."
One side of the equation for Raye included working with New York-based one9ine, the design studio that designed the whatever.nike.com site. "We flew one of the designers and a producer to all the broadcast shoots—not just to take still photos and digital video, but to get a sense of what the director was after," she recalls. "We really wanted the transition from broadcast to online to feel seamless, and not have it be a crazy afterthought. Each of the endings begins with animation that kind of takes off from the last frame of the spot."
Another important factor was discussing the way the images would appear on a TV screen and a computer screen. Wide, complicated shots play well on large TV screens, but the Web site is viewed on a smaller QuickTime screen. "During the shoot, we were always aware that we had to bring stuff to the lens so people could get a good look at it on the Web," explains Palumbo.
Raye admits that some of the Web scenarios probably wouldn’t pass muster on TV. For instance, characters are shown being sucker-punched by McGwire or having an arm cut off while racing Jones. "The freedom of the Web was part of the excitement for the creatives," says Raye. "They didn’t have to go through broadcast clearances. On the Web, there’s nobody censoring you. The expectation, on the Internet, is that things can get a little weird."
Online
The Nike campaign was not the first time that Raye contributed to an interactive project combining TV and the Web. She previously worked on a campaign for the Calvin Klein fragrance CKOne that included an email link to the characters. "If you sent email to the CKOne address," explains Raye, "You’d get an email back, in the character’s voice, that kind of continued whatever they were saying in the spot."
Raye says that while the CKOne spots were understated and intriguing, the Nike commercials are kinetic and over-the-top. "Certain products really lend themselves to this kind of interactive campaign. Anything that’s character-driven works well. And the whole concept of the ads is to show what the Nike Air Cross Trainer II is good for—running, golf, snowboarding, whatever you can think of."
Raye’s career in advertising might be described as a kind of professional cross training. While at Colgate University, Hamilton, N.Y., she studied film and literature and hoped to become a teacher. Her first teaching job, though, was only part-time, so she learned a new skill: computer programming. "I found a job at an alternative school in Portland," she says. "They needed someone to run their computer lab. It’s funny, but I didn’t know that much about computers at the time."
This was in ’93, when the Internet was first becoming a popular and commercial medium. "My students were designing their personal Web sites," she says, "and all there was, at the time, was HTML 1.O, which was relatively simple. It wasn’t that hard for me to learn the scripts, and what I didn’t know, some of the kids—who were so advanced—taught me. I went into that job being only interested in teaching film and literature, and I left there having been almost forced to learn and appreciate this new medium."
From there, Raye worked as a producer for a few Portland-based Web design companies, creating sites for corporate clients, and joined W&K in ’96. The new Nike campaign was her last job working out of the Portland office; soon afterward, she became the director of interactive production at W&K’s Amsterdam office. Katie Shields, another interactive producer at W&K, Portland, finished up the campaign.
Raye views her Nike work as a harbinger in advertising. "A few years from now, everybody’s going to be playing with broadcast-to-email, broadcast-to-Web strategies," she says. "It’s great to be at the forefront, because I think there’s a whole window of opportunity to do more."t
