Nike Japan’s lecturing was bound to backfire

David Ogilvy once said that ‘a good advertisement is one that sells the product without drawing attention to itself’. If so, the new Nike ad currently running in Japan is about as big a failure as you can get. It has certainly drawn plenty of attention to itself, producing more angry denunciations than sales. 

The ad snappily titled ‘The Future isn’t Waiting’ features scenes of bullying and discrimination directed at mixed-raced athletes in Japanese schools. They then fight back and triumph through the power of sport — and the power of Nike sportswear. Boycotters have claimed that the ad massively overstates a real, but far from endemic or Japan-specific problem, and is stirring up division under the fig leaf of Nike’s progressive ‘corporate values’ while really just cynically exploiting currently fashionable ideology for profit.

One reason the Nike ad may have been so badly received here is that the Japanese are simply not used to this kind of advertising.