All told, it was clear that the campaign needed to be something powerful.

Knowing that Nike is a performance athletic brand, the agency knew the insight for the campaign had to come from the POV of the athlete (unlike, say, Coke or ESPN that comes at it from the fan perspective).

After reviewing all of the previous Olympic sponsor advertising from the past, most of the work missed a key insight uncovered during a months long research study with Nike athletes: despite the heartwarming environment around the GAMES, athletes possess a near pathological desire for victory in Olympic COMPETITION.

That was a truth that had never been told by Nike, nor exposed by any other brand. Under normal circumstances, it might not have been the best approach, but given what Nike was up against, it had the potential to – as Phil Knight used to say – “wake up the consumer.”

The initial direction was then crystallized and brought to life in a brief by Evelyn Monroe and John C Jay (including the George Orwell quote “Sport is war, minus the killing”), in what turned out to be a new model for how to brief Nike creative.

The resulting campaign rocked Atlanta and was the most talked-about advertising during the Olympics: Andre Agassi smashing a paparazzi camera, Bob Kampeinen throwing up all over his Nike shoes, blood flying from a boxer’s mouthguard, athletes getting taken off the pitch on a stretcher, Tony Kaye directing, “Search & Destroy” by Iggy Pop, a shoot manifesto that demanded product shots look like “sawed-off shotguns resting on a pillow of raw meat” and the controversial outdoor headline in Atlanta, “You don’t win silver, you lose gold.”

The moral of the story is that ChatGPT’s brief got a fair bit right, so let’s unpack it.