Sneakerheads and sports fans have been sent into orbit, enjoying some good old-fashioned guerrilla marketing to celebrate 40 years of a good old-fashioned icon—the Nike Jordan Air 1s.
Earlier this week, ahead of the Grammys, a new ad, “You Can’t Ban Greatness” featured top athletes and entertainers, including Travis Scott, DJ Khaled, and Howard University’s cheer squad. The ad celebrates Jordan Brand’s past, present, and future impact.
This follows weeks of japes, including mere weeks ago, fans stepping onto the hallowed turf of the United Centre, the home of their beloved Chicago Bulls, and being greeted by black bars covering the kicks on the feet of the Michael Jordan statue.
With iconic Air Jordan trainers obscured, Nike’s playful stunt pays homage to a watershed moment in their shared history. It was born out of controversial beginnings in which the NBA attempted to prohibit him from wearing the iconic “Bred” (black and red) colourway, which violated archaic league uniform policy at the time.
And for anyone who has watched lockdown hit “The Last Dance” or Nike Biopic Air knows, Jordan shunned the rules to incur a $5,000 per game fine that Nike paid and capitalised on in a publicity campaign, releasing a 1985 “Banned” ad, which placed animated black bars over the Air Jordan 1s amid the NBA’s shoe restrictions at the time. They sold millions of shoes, and the rest is, as they say, history.
What’s more, the self-referential marketing campaign didn’t stop there. Tickers scrolled around the statues, saying, “If it was just a shoe, why did they try to ban it?”
Even better than that, the gag preceding the statue stunt, the brand deactivated its Instagram and placed black bars over the shoe retail outlet.
With this one-two punch of IRL and URL frenzy causing tomfoolery and setting social media ablaze, the internal comms machine even got in on the action. A handful of Nike employees were handed a playful “citation” by some besuited and official-looking fashion police roaming around Nike HQ for turning up in Jordans.
This all precedes, yep, you guessed it, a drop of a limited run of reimagined Air Jordan 1 ’85 “Bred” shoes, hitting retail on 14th Feb and said to be a properly faithful recreation of the original. And with 10,000 pairs up for grabs, this is a guaranteed way to create the desired meltdown amongst sneakerheads.
All remarkably simple, befittingly old school and classic in its approach to creating hysteria around their own iconic lore, this is a beautifully choreographed bit of hysteria-making and a gentle reminder of Nike’s OG status when it comes to kicks.
