“Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.” Nine words, spoken by a quarterback no NFL team would sign, turned into the most polarizing thirty seconds of advertising in a generation — and Nike knew exactly what it was doing.
In September 2018, to mark the 30th anniversary of “Just Do It,” Nike and longtime agency Wieden+Kennedy built a campaign around Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who had knelt during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police violence against Black Americans and hadn’t played a regular-season snap since. The ad paired his voice with black-and-white footage of athletes fighting long odds — an eight-year-old wrestler born without a leg, Serena Williams, LeBron James — before closing on Kaepernick’s own face and the line that made the campaign a lightning rod.
The backlash was instant and loud. Videos of people burning Nike sneakers and cutting the swoosh off their socks flooded social media under #BoycottNike and #JustBurnIt, and Nike’s stock dropped roughly 3% on the ad’s opening day. The president weighed in on Twitter. Sports commentators argued about it for weeks.
Then the numbers moved the other way. Nike’s online sales jumped 31% in the days after the spot aired, according to Edison Trends, and the stock closed at an all-time high within a month. Nike had bet correctly on who its actual customer was — not the crowd burning shoes on camera, but the much larger, younger audience that agreed with Kaepernick.
The campaign went on to win an Emmy for Outstanding Commercial in 2019 — an award voted on by the same industry that had spent a year arguing about it. Kaepernick still hasn’t played in the NFL again. The ad outlasted the controversy by years.
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