Nike has always been one of the smartest operators when it comes to engaging the crowd, but one of the key lessons we learned when writing Crowd Surfing was that even the best can occasionally come unstuck when it comes to dealing with the empowered consumer.
A fairly harmless, low quality video of amateur basketball player, Jordan Crawford – scoring a slam dunk against Nike’s star player, Lebron James, during a university skills academy – has suddenly become one of the hottest videos on YouTube, thanks to Nike’s clumsy attempt to protect the fragile ego of their star. Official tapes of the event, filmed by CBS, were confiscated but predictably footage began to appear online. Over one million YouTube views later, Nike is facing a rare PR disaster. Here’s how the story was reported:
Hopefully Nike will restore my faith in its Crowd Surfing abilities by signing up Crawford to appear in their next ad.
One Comment
Like it. There was a similar video in which an adidas sponsored player (i don’t know which one) gets beaten in a one-on-one game against an amateur. It got millions of hits. Isn’t there also another Nike one where Rooney gets nutmegged by a kid during some 5-a-side game?
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[...] og þótt svo hefði orðið, hefðu viðbrögð James ekki verið gerð að neinu aðalatriði. Á Crowdsurfing má sjá nánari umfjöllun um [...]