"Just Do It." It's one of the most iconic and effective advertising taglines of all time -- in 1999, Ad Age ranked it as the No. 2 ad slogan of the 20th century, behind only "A diamond is forever" -- and it debuted on July 1, 1988, 35 years ago this month.
The first Just Do It ad, for Nike, was a TV spot featuring a San Francisco runner named Walt Stack. It was made by the Portland, Oregon, agency Wieden+Kennedy, and the line was written by its cofounder, Dan Wieden. It would help turn W+K into both a global behemoth and a legendary creative shop, and it would help transform Nike from respected Pacific Northwest running-shoe manufacturer into the world's dominant athletic-gear brand.
But perhaps most remarkably, the line "Just do it" was inspired by a murderer.
First, the brief.
Nike was a successful company well before 1988. But it was a small successful company, making only great running shoes. Phil Knight, its CEO, had been a runner at the University of Oregon, and together with his coach he'd founded its predecessor company. By the mid-1980s, they'd reached $1 billion in sales by targeting elite athletes and advertising in places like Runner's World. But the market for serious athletes was only so big. The mass fitness revolution was happening, and Reebok came out of nowhere with more style-conscious sneakers to become the market leader. In 1987, Nike was forced to lay off 20 percent of its workforce. They knew it was time to pivot, to reach a larger audience, to move from marketing the product to marketing an idea, a lifestyle, an emotion.
They turned to W+K, Nike's longtime ad makers, and for the first time were ready to spend significant money on national TV. The spots wouldn't be about top-level athletes; they would be about regular people making extraordinary efforts -- people like Walt Stack, a construction worker who every day ran 17 miles across the Golden Gate Bridge. There would be five spots, made by five different teams, and as the campaign got ready to launch, Wieden got worried that they'd feel too disconnected. They needed, he realized, a tagline to bring them all together. He stayed up one night and wrote four or five.
That's where the murderer comes in.
Gary Gilmore killed two men in Utah in the summer of 1976. Later that year, he became the first person in the United States to be sentenced to the death penalty after the Supreme Court re-instituted the practice. Like Wieden, he'd grown up in Portland, although Gilmore had been in and out of jail there. After his murder conviction, he seemed to be determined to die: He chose not to appeal his death sentence. In Utah then, the two forms of execution were hanging or firing squad, and he chose the firing squad because he worried a hanging could be botched. When his final day came in early 1977, he replied, "Let's do it."
That certainty stuck with Wieden, he'd recall later. "Let's do it" became "Just do it," and his Nike tagline was born.
Phil Knight didn't like the line, Wieden has always said. Wieden insisted the Nike chief trust him. It was the right call. Nike was rejuvenated. Within ten years, sales grew 1000 percent. The tagline outlasted that specific campaign and has remained a fixture of Nike's marketing ever since. Former Nike CMO Liz Dolan, who started at the company just before the Just Do It launch, told The Washington Post in 2018 that each year execs at the company would try to come up with something new and better. They never did.
Throughout the '90s, Michael Jordan just did it. Tiger Woods went pro with a Just Do It ad. Nike made national news -- and won an Emmy -- by making Colin Kaepernick the face of its 30th anniversary Just Do It campaign.
By Wieden's death last October, his agency had 1,500 employees and offices around the world. Having placed his holdings in a trust, it will always remain independent. Nike, meanwhile, remains the largest athletic footwear brand in the world, with $29.1 billion in sales last year.
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