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Stephen Semple:
Here’s the brilliance of the ad. It spoke to me, even though I’m not a runner.

Matthew Burns:
You know what? I don’t think I ever would have thought of Nike as a risqué advertiser.

The double entendre of the ad you’re about to watch, to me, freaked me out, because I honestly started watching it, and because I knew it was a Nike ad, I saw it on YouTube, so I already knew it was a Nike ad. It’s on their channel, and then my dirty mind took over about why all these people were really sore, and it was playing, Love Hurts.

Oh my God, it was so good. Watch this.

 

*Love Hurts song playing*
Radio Announcer: And this one is for everyone who ran the marathon yesterday, I hope you’re doing okay out there.

Matthew Burns:
Oh my God, have you ever run a marathon, Steve?

Stephen Semple:
No, but you know what? Here’s the brilliance of the ad, it spoke to me, even though I’m not a runner. So, I’m a crazy, stupid, fanatical snowboarder, I have four snowboards, and I use them all through the season for different reasons. And one of the first visits I do at the end of the season is I go to my podiatrist, because my toes are blackened from jumps and lands, my feet are a mess. And I go to my podiatrist, and they fix up my feet, because I can barely frickin’ walk by the end of the season.

So, this whole thing of doing something that you’re passionate about, and it causing pain, it resonated with me, even though I’m not a runner. I don’t run, could never even imagine a marathon, but it spoke to me.

Matthew Burns:
So Dylan is the producer on this show, and he’s incredible in his own right. Him and I are gonna be doing an episode on Nike coming up in the next couple of weeks, and it was an older, last-year campaign, and we think that they did a great job producing the ad. Dylan loved the ad. I love the ad, but it only spoke to people who think like I do. It didn’t hit their core audience. And one of my favorite part about finding this ad was, and putting it up first so we can show the juxtaposition in a couple of weeks, is when I went through the comments of this ad, everybody was like, thank God they’re talking to their people again.

Thank God they’re getting back on track. They’re not losing anymore. It was amazing to watch the comments as I went down. There was a couple of people, and there’s always gonna be, a few of them are like, oh, why are you showing that? You know working out is hard.

Well, yeah, it’s hard. It’s the whole thing. You don’t work out because it’s easy. You work out because you have a goal to set. You didn’t wake up on Sunday and go, hey, oh, it’s a Boston marathon. Let’s go. I’m gonna run with 10,000 people and possibly not finish. That’s not the mindset of somebody who has a passion for something, which is what you were talking about at the beginning. I’m so happy for Nike with this ad.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Cause Nike’s core audience has always been – Just do it. That speaks to the weekend warrior. And the weekend warrior wakes up Monday sore, especially as we get older.

Matthew Burns:
More and more every weekend.

Stephen Semple:
Yes, exactly. It does actually speak to their core audience and in the audience that made Nike famous, and made Nike huge, and made Nike billions, the weekend warrior athlete who just does it because they love it.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. Listen, you’re going to get lactic acid buildup when you run for a really long time and you’re not going to be able to walk with those muscles. I mean, that’s just the way this works, whether we like it or we don’t, that’s the way it is. Even if you’re a highly trained athlete, your legs are going to feel like crap at the end, but this is a shared experience that everybody goes through. And the comments that I did read where they were like, “Oh, way to go.” Talking about winning and whatnot. And then now talking about how much it hurts afterwards. I’m like, yeah, everybody knows that though. And that shared experience that everybody goes through, but I want to give them full out credit. They picked an amazing song to put your mind in a different direction If you didn’t know it was a Nike ad. But then when you watch it the second or third time, if you look at their shoes, as they’re walking down the stairs, they over exaggerated the Nike logo. So you could see it from a distance, which I thought was funny.

There was a lady with the yellow shoes, the little girl-almost-looking person going down the stairs and changing legs, which one she goes down. All of that shared personal experience, but you wouldn’t know it the first time we went through it until you get to the very end.

And I was so happy and proud of them for holding that line and making our brains go somewhere different and then snapping it back to the brand. And that snapping it back to the brand is what makes it sticky again.

Stephen Semple:
It was well done. And I’m glad to see because they’ve gotten a little bit away from their core audiences we’ve talked about. And this goes back to their history and their roots of what made them amazing and successful.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. And I’m not going to harp on this one. This is going to be a nice short episode for everybody. They’ve got two or three now that they’ve been running in 2025 that have this very same structure – 30 seconds, get in, tell a quick story about people.

I think one of them was running in the rain. It was really good. When you have a passion for something you do. You know what? I do have that one!

Stephen Semple:
I do want to add one other thing. When you speak to an emotion or an experience… one could argue that ad was for runners, but it wasn’t. Because remember how I said at the beginning, 100% it spoke to me and I snowboard and I don’t run. Because of the experience, because of the emotion you actually, because sometimes people worry, well, I’m only speaking to runners and we talked to a lot of other people.

No, anybody who does a sport in a passionate way to a degree where they experienced some pain from it, that spoke to it.

Matthew Burns:
That’s brilliant. I’m not going to talk about it because you and I haven’t talked about it. But I am going to play the other one. I forgot that I left it there and it’s running in the rain and it was done very well because again, you don’t run in the rain unless you have a passion for something and they’re finally getting back to that core audience.

And that’s what I want to leave us with today.

 

*Song: You are my sunshine. My Only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.*

Matthew Burns:
Thank you for watching. We love doing this for you guys. We doing it for ourselves really ’cause we’re geeks about this stuff. If you have any questions, let us know down in the comments. If you want to see something specific, let us know, you know, smash the like and subscribe. I don’t know. That’s what the kids say. So I’m going to try and say it too.

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