You wanna race?" asks Olympic sprinter Marion Jones in the first few seconds of Nike’s "Racing Marion." The :60 is the first in a series of spots created by Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore., for Nike’s Air Cross Trainer II that begins a story on television and finishes it on the Web.
"Racing Marion" is shot from the perspective of a participant in the action, so essentially you are the person who is racing Marion. The spot opens on you looking at a magazine called Fast Women, with Jones’ face on the cover. You look up and see that Jones is standing right in front of you, preparing for a run. Noticing your stare, Jones mocks you by asking if you want to race. Apparently you do, because you begin running in relentless pursuit of the champion sprinter. Jones cruises through a Santa Monica neighborhood, blazing through backyards and people’s houses—while you huff and puff behind her, knocking over an old woman, fighting with dogs, borrowing someone’s bike and then falling off that bike. At one point, Jones is kind enough to offer you a drink from a garden hose before the race resumes. Finally, the chase leads to a boardwalk, where a carnival act juggler tosses chainsaws in the air. Unfortunately, you run right into him and as the chainsaw is about to do its damage, the moment is frozen and a white super reads: "Continued at whatever.nike. com."
Oh my gosh! But how will it end? The viewer now has to log on to discover his/her fate. A choice of seven endings offers gruesome titles such as "Decapitation," "Missing Arm" and "Boxing."
While it may sound gimmicky, there was a method to the agency’s madness. "Nike was excited by all the activities you could do in a cross-trainer, so we came up with a creative solution that was as innovative as the shoe itself," explained Wieden & Kennedy creative director Hal Curtis.
The agency decided to incorporate the Web as a way to appeal to tech-savvy teens, because "it was an interesting way to have them spend more time with a brand, rather than just a thirty-second spot," added Wieden & Kennedy creative director Bob Moore.
Swedish director Johan Renck, who is represented stateside by bicoastal Mars Media and overseas by Pettersson Ackerlund Renck (P.A.R.), Stockholm, was enlisted to shoot the point-of-view-style vignettes. "Johan had the technical ability to pull this off, and he invented a way of shooting that was really interesting," related Moore.
Renck constructed a backpack-like apparatus where a camera could sit on one of DP Henrik Halvarsson’s shoulders. The two-day shoot then consisted of having Halvarsson chase Jones all day long. "Usually commercials work under other circumstances: You put up your lights, you determine the shots you want to take, you rehearse them. But this was like, strapping the camera to Henrik as soon as daylight broke and just going like mad until the sun went down on the horizon," said Renck.
Even during the off-season, Jones never seemed to tire but, according to Renck, Halvarsson took quite a beating during the shoot. "He fell, he had to get stitches—at one point we thought we were going to have to hospitalize him!" Renck related.
Because the endings were going to be broadcast over the Internet only, the agency had carte blanche to be as provocative as it wanted to be. In one scenario, you come to the horrifying realization that the chainsaw has lopped off one of your arms. Insistent on racing Jones, you simply pick the arm up, carry it with your good hand, and continue running. The most morbid ending renders you decapitated by the chainsaw so that your point of view is now rolling around at ground level. "It was fun because you don’t have the traditional constraints you have in broadcast with both content and time," said Curtis.
Wieden & Kennedy’s interactive division worked with Web design studio one9ine, New York, to post the footage onto the Web with Apple’s QuickTime streaming media technology. "Doing it this way was a lot of work, because it’s not like "Racing Marion" is just one spot. It’s seven different commercials, plus the :60 and :30, plus the online copy and coming up with the rollover prompts," Curtis explained.
Billed as being the first agency to create a spot that starts on TV and ends on the Internet has inspired interest and frustration among those who were gunning to set the same precedent. "We have e-mails from people in the business who are angry because we were the first ones to do it," mused Curtis.
Nike is set to air two more spots in the same format, featuring St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGuire and snowboarding champ Rob Kingwill.
