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We’ve been watching awesome Nike ads for quite a while. Over the years, a lot of shoes have come and gone, and so have their respective ads. Half the time, a Nike commercial doesn’t even advertise shoes. They must have been one of the first brands to do so with great success.

I could comment about Nike as a brand, and their advertising for days and days, but I won’t. (although I suppose this blog would be the place for it). Instead, I refer to you Parlayer, where someone spent the time to compile a list of the top 20 Nike Ads over the years.

If I could add to this list I’d include the Nike baseball ad from recent years where Bach’s cello concierto No. 1 (Sarabande) is played to over some slo-mo footage of ball players against a black background. Also, there was a great ad back in the mid 90s where they took Gil Scott-Heron’s classic “The Revolution will not be televised” and set the lyrics to a basketball theme. Again, on a black background but much more ’street’. I remember the final line — The revolution is about basketball, and basketball is the truth. And I also liked the series from the mid 90s where they were promoting the NYC series of shoes which were essentially the same old stuff from ten years earlier, reissued. That series just showed a brick wall and had a voiceover of someone telling a story of New York and basketball. Didn’t even mention Nike until the very end.

I can find none of those ads on YouTube.

Here’s a side note: Why are we using YouTube as the de facto archive of television advertising? Is there no better place on the web for ads to be viewed and tagged specifically for advertising. Someone needs to build that site, and in a hurry. I’ll come on board as an investor, we’ll be the next digg, you’ll see. I remember ads.com back in 2000-2003ish. Seems nothing has taken the place since then. Pity.

// a tale of advertising: tv/radio, brands & branding
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