WINNER
Title: Nike Freestyle
Media agency: MindShare
Media director: James Ledger
Account director: Malcolm Russell
Creative agency: Wieden & Kennedy
Marketing director: Benj Fearn
Client: Nike
Brand/product: Freestyle
Media brand manager: Dan Alder
What began life as a series of TV ads featuring an animated stickman with dazzling ball skills grew into an urban youth movement with "freestyle" events up and down the country within four months of launch. The campaign helped Nike stay top of the league of sports brands and, in 2003, reported record profits in the UK. The commercials, created by Wieden & Kennedy, set out to make a hero out of Nike's stickman character - dubbed the "master freestyler" - so that children would ape his moves.
To get its audience more interested in the freestyle "movement" (essentially a mixture of ball skills, either football or basketball, and hip-hop), Nike's agencies made a TV documentary , Freestyler Face Off, telling the story of four British basketballers who travel to New York to pitch their skills against their American counterparts.
Children were then given the chance to compete in a series of events called the "Freestyle Face Off Tour", promoted using outdoor and PR. Four spots on MTV showed glimpses of the action which attracted 30,000 freestylers, all strutting their stuff to a hip-hop soundtrack.
Four contenders made it to the grand final and four different interactive spots, aired on MTV, allowed viewers to vote for their favourite freestyler by e-mail or SMS.
The tournament prompted 200,000 fans to respond to the ads, while 20,000 cast votes. A 60-second spot on MTV, plus posters in football magazines and an event at Niketown celebrated the coronation of Newport's Abbas Farid as the king of freestyle.
