Sunday, May 23, 2010

Rooins

Well, fuck you, Nike. Here I am giving you free publicity and you make it hard for me.

I caught the Nike "Write the Future" commercial on Facebook a couple of days ago. Absolutely brilliant, and I'll be the first one to say that international soccer has become WAY too commercial and outfits like Nike are among the worst offenders.

But I was absolutely entranced by the bit in the middle where Manchester United and England striker Wayne Rooney gets his pocket picked and in ten seconds his imagination takes him down the road to celebrity hell; public hatred, private failure, a byword and a hissing until he's groundskeeping for some dismal club mired in the bottom division and living in a crap trailer with a nasty ginger beard...so he races off and makes the saving tackle, to end up knighted, snogging the queen and whipping Roger Federer at table tennis.

So I embedded it in this post for your entertainment. Now I go and find that Nike has forced the original Vimeo poster to pull it down. Smart, Nike. Smart.

It's this kind of thing that makes the old business firms look like the south end of a northbound dinosaur. Sad, really. You had a chance to go viral, Nike, and you blew it.

(h/t to Nalden, who posted this on vimeo...)

1 comment:

Lisa said...

FDC,

Re. Nike, a friend just made me aware of Nike campaign most distressing -- call it, the hagiography of LeBron James.

Here, Nikebasketball.com poster shows LeBron with outstretched arms under the motto, "We are all witnesses".

More blarney cites him as "The Chosen One".

Jeez, what stupid Idolatry (though that may be an oxymoron.) Just how stupid are we?