NIKE

Wieden + Kennedy’s latest Nike Women campaign was going global. There was one problem: the women copywriters at W+K’s Shanghai office were busy. There was only one choice left: me.

I am not a woman. I am not Chinese. 0% authenticity. How was I going to craft an authentic expression of a campaign I had no business crafting? 

I started to think about how I could get myself out of the project. Not how I could quit or jump out the window, but how I could keep my voice out of the campaign altogether. We knew that Nike wanted to cast a bunch of  influencer. What if we could use their voices and not mine? All of these women are already really good at something. What if we could show the greater China market that even the most talented of us have to start somewhere?

We asked the influencers which sports they’ve always wanted to try. Then, we simply granted their wish. We let them be bad at something on camera. Then, after each shoot, we interviewed them about their experience. How hard it was, how they kept themselves going, how they felt after getting through it. 

Then, I built voiceover scripts from their direct quotes.

We made our piece of the campaign, we made the client happy, we made videos with millions and millions of views and sold sneakers. More importantly for me, I changed the way I think about authenticity. I understood that I do not need to be authentically tied to m

Directed by Paola Morabito
Written by Alexander Barrett & Jimmy Chen
Art Directed by Shaun Sundholm
Creative Directed by Azsa West & Terrance Leong
Made at W+K Shanghai