Watch above or read below.

Matthew Burns: Steve, don’t say anything, please. Okay. Watch this.

Walt Stack, 80 Years Old: I run 17 miles every morning. People ask me how I keep my teeth from chattering in the wintertime. I leave them in my locker.

Matthew Burns: Yeah. We’ve never done this one!

Stephen Semple: This is one of those weird ones that if somebody had asked me, I would have said, oh yeah, we’ve done it because we had to, right? This is one of the standard ads I use in one of my presentations.

Matthew Burns: Like, how have we not done the first “Just Do It” ad for Nike? Like, come on, this sets up their entire brand promise, which I’ve done an ad about how they’ve broken their brand promise. I’ve just never done an ad where we talked about where it started.

Stephen Semple: Where they actually made it in the first place

Matthew Burns: Hey, Steve, talk to me, man.

Stephen Semple: I love this ad. Now, first of all, when you look for it on YouTube and whatnot, it’s often labeled as Nike’s first commercial. It is not. It’s the first “Just Do It” commercial. It’s very hard to actually find the first Nike commercial. And it’s all about the technology, and it’s like, got these apes running and people studying how the foot runs and how their technology is better and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it did not work, did not move the needle. No one cared.

And then all of a sudden, Walt runs across the Golden Gate Bridge, and people fall in love with Nike. And here’s the reason why. So you know how we talk about how marketing is emotion. Win the heart, and the mind will follow. Win the heart, and the mind will make up justifications. This ad is actually aspirational.

If you’re doing a presentation, because I’ve done this numerous times now, where I run this ad, and I stop it. And before I go on, I ask people, are there any runners in the room? Inevitably, a couple of hands go up. Do you want to be that guy? They all go, I want to be that guy. He is not a celebrity. He’s not a pro athlete. He’s an old dude running across the bridge who, when the weather’s cold, how he keeps his teeth from chattering by leaving them in his locker, and every runner on the planet sees that and goes, when I’m his age, that’s what I want to be doing.

And suddenly, the appeal to the weekend warrior is born. Not the professional athlete, the person who just wants to keep doing the sport that they love better. I just want to do it better. I want to do it longer. I want to continue to enjoy it.

Matthew Burns: Yes, I want to wake up and do the thing I love because I love doing it. Not for any goal, not for anything else, I enjoy this. I want to do it, and I want to be comfortable doing it. So I’m running in Nike’s.

Stephen Semple: It’s the entire campaign. And, I think a lot of people don’t get that Just Do It is actually aspirational. That’s the emotion of aspiration. It’s not telling. You’re not saying, just do it. It’s just do it. Right.

Matthew Burns: Listen, I’ve analyzed an ad with Dylan Bernier, and that was really well produced, like super beautifully produced, and it struck a chord with me because I trained baseball players, young kids who are high performance. They’re moving, they’re trying to move themselves and get into college or go to play for the national team or whatever. And it moved me, but it broke the brand promise.

And you and I had a good conversation about this, where I was like, holy crap, yeah, I really love this ad. And you’re like, yeah, but Matt, who’s it talking to? And it’s amazing because we’re talking about, you know, the year I remember the year this ad, but it’s 1980. Oh, this is freaking old.

Stephen Semple: Oh, this ad is freaking old. Like early to mid-80s.

Matthew Burns: Yeah. So, forever ago and in 2023 or whatever it was, they did this, am I a bad person ad for Nike. And it’s that, I mean, we’re talking like, again, a quarter of a century of Just Do It having a brand promise. This is what we stand for. And then they run this, this opposite one. But that’s how powerful this Just Do It ad campaign became. And it started with this ad, which told a story of an old man running across a bridge.

And he was interesting. He was like, I call him a cute old man because he’s talking about his… Why are you talking about your teeth? Right? Obviously, he doesn’t put him back in his mouth when he’s running.

Matthew Burns: You feel for him, and you want to be him.

Stephen Semple: And also, there’s the beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge. And like, there’s a lot of really nice cinematography. Here’s the thing that’s interesting right now. It’s going to be interesting to watch Nike right now because it is struggling. Well, it is because they have leaned so heavily into becoming a fashion company. And they’ve allowed a lot of other companies to come into their space, like Under Armour and whatnot, who make more are perceived as making more serious sport gear. And Nike is trying to pivot back, and it’s going to be interesting to see whether they revive the Just Do It campaign.

Matthew Burns: Oh, interesting. I never thought of that. Yeah. That’s true.

Stephen Semple: And if they do, do they do it right? And the reason why I keep harping on this, on this emotion where people blow these things when they revive it, is that they don’t actually, they think, oh, it’s because of the ads. No, it’s we want to be Walt.

Matthew Burns: Correct.

Stephen Semple: That’s what made it magical. So we wanted to be him. We aspire to be him.

Matthew Burns: I want to be active in my old age. I want to still be moving and doing things in my old age.

Stephen Semple: Right. And again, and it does not. All these aspirational ones don’t need to be old age. It can just be beating the guy on the court.

Matthew Burns: Oh, yes. But I’m just saying this ad, right?

Stephen Semple: Yeah. But the emotion on all of them is this: I want to do that this weekend.

Matthew Burns: I agree 100%. No, I just don’t know why we never highlighted this ad.

Stephen Semple: I don’t know either. It’s a mystery to me, man. I thought we had. So much for the whole like, actually, this is really interesting. You know, when you talk about recall. Like if you ask somebody something they recall, if you had asked me this, I would have said, no, we’ve done it. Yeah. That’s what happened

Matthew Burns: I said, Steve, let’s do this ad. And you were like, “We haven’t done this one.” I was like, no. I would have lost that bet. Those are the words you said. I would have lost that.

Stephen Semple: I totally thought we had. So it’s really weird about like, this is the reason why recall of past things is not all that great, right? Because I was like, oh no, we totally did this. Like, wasn’t it our first or second one?

Matthew Burns: It also goes to show that you are emotionally connected to the ad because you put logic to it like, like it’s, you are emotionally connected to the ad. You’ve talked about it, you know it, you know the origin of it. You know Walt. Like this is the thing, you’re so emotionally connected to it that you were like, we had to have done it because I’m that emotionally connected to it. The facts mean nothing. Matthew. Yes. We’ve never done it. Who cares? We’ve had to have done it!

Thank you guys. We love talking about it, and we will see you guys next time on another edition of Sticky Sales Stories.

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