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In 1988, three words changed the world. “Just Do It,” Nike’s enduringly famous slogan, was developed by Portland, Oregon, advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy and launched as part of a wildly successful 1988 campaign. An instant success, over the years “Just Do It” has become a permanent fixture in popular culture and has been consistently heralded as the greatest advertising tagline in history (including just last week, by one of Wieden & Kennedy’s own employees).
The first commercial ever to the bear the “Just Do It” line is a surprisingly humble ode to an elderly jogger named Walt Stack. Stack, we’re told, although he is “80 years old,” runs “seventeen miles every morning.” The thirty-second spot follows Stack as he runs across the Golden Gate Bridge, smiling all the while and offering up a folksy one-liner to close things out: “People ask me how I keep my teeth from chattering in the winter time. I leave ‘em in my locker.” The commercial introduces “Just Do It” in a low-key way, as a straightforward call to action. C’mon! If Walt can do it, what’s your excuse!
Another launch spot from 1988 voiced the self-help message more aggressively. A woman with a towel around her neck brusquely asks, “So you wanna get in shape?”, while her words begin to echo in the soundtrack. “And you can’t decide between running…” – the ominous layered audio continues – “…cycling, basketball, tennis, aerobics, weights…volleyball…cycling…tennis…aerobics…so don’t…” Finally, as the cacophony becomes overwhelming, she urges the viewer to “Just do it.” She delivers the line in near-disgust, as it flashes over and over in minimal white type on a black screen. Then, after the end card – the Nike Air logo – the woman appears in close-up for one last admonishment: “And it wouldn’t hurt to stop eating like a pig either.”
Tonally, the campaign that launched “Just Do It” is, by today’s standards, a little all over the place. Watching the early “Just Do It” ads now, they come off as nostalgic, but slightly underwhelming in that way all classic “great advertising” is when you go back and revisit it. But it is difficult to overstate the impact “Just Do It” had (and still has) on Nike’s brand, on Nike’s business, and on popular culture globally.
Falling behind Reebok in the 1980s, Nike’s new strategy at the time was to sell to non-professional athletes – a departure from their foundational DNA, which was very serious and performance-based, and emphasizing professional footwear for professional athletes. In Randall Rothenberg’s 1994 book Where The Suckers Moon, a sort-of history of Wieden & Kennedy, Nike’s design director Peter Moore says, “If you said the word ‘fashion’ in a Nike meeting, you were a really bad guy. You didn’t know what you were talking about.”
Anti-fashion or not, Nike was aware they had to change course. In the 1984 Nike Annual Report Nike reported to shareholders that net income had dropped by 29%. Phil Knight, co-founder and CEO, wrote, “Most importantly, our domestic footwear market is changing, edging away from athletic looks to a renewed demand for fashion and traditional styles.” And, to correct the slump, he added that Nike would be taking “advantage of the opportunities in the changing American market” by introducing their first “casual shoe,” and taking “what we stand for – sport – into versatile, fun and exciting directions.”
In Art & Copy, a 2009 documentary about advertising greats, Liz Dolan, Nike’s former head of marketing – who had joined the company about a month before “Just Do It” debuted – explains:
It was clear that the number one mission of Nike is to serve to the athlete. But it was in the late eighties that the definition of athlete got expanded way beyond just the professional endorsers.
That “expanded” definition certainly paid off. In 1988 alone, Nike spent $40 million on advertising. And, according to a brief case study, in the ten years after “Just Do It” was introduced, from 1988 and 1998, Nike’s market share of the “domestic sport-shoe business” grew from 18% ($877 million) to a shocking 43% ($9.2 billion). (To this day, though it’s perhaps the ultimate “lifestyle brand,” Nike still demurs when referred to as such; “fashion” is still a bad word. Dolan says, “All Nike ever wanted to do was to inspire people to participate in sports.”)
Obviously “Just Do It” was a success. In addition to its sales figures, the campaign introduced enduring and humanizing values like humor to Nike’s messaging, something the brand had been lacking prior to 1988. As the case study concludes, the campaign embraced “not just resolve and purpose, but also the ‘beauty, drama and moral uplift of sport – even, every now and then, fun.’” It also made Nike very cool.
At the time, the origins of the line “Just Do It” were unknown, at least publicly. Yet the peculiar provenance of the massively successful “Just Do It” tagline was finally revealed by its creator, Dan Wieden, co-founder of Wieden & Kennedy, in 2009 in Art & Copy. In the documentary, Wieden says, chuckling,
Actually, the inspiration for this came from a man that was about to be executed for murder in Utah. And his final words to the firing squad were “let’s do it,” and um, so I thought, well, probably, I like the “do it” part of it.
The “man that was about to be executed” was 36-year-old Gary Gilmore, and he was executed at Utah State Prison in Draper, Utah, on January 17, 1977. Gilmore had been convicted of killing a gas station attendant and a motel manager, both in Utah, a year earlier. Gilmore was the first prisoner in the United States to be executed since 1967. The 1976 Supreme Court decision Gregg v. Georgia effectively ended the moratorium on capital punishment that had been imposed after the 1972 Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia – which had deemed death sentences “cruel and unusual” punishment, thus unconstitutional. Gilmore was executed by firing squad, as Wieden says.
Gilmore’s case created a media frenzy in the United States in 1977. It was, as Joan Didion put it, “covered to that pitch at which the coverage itself might have seemed the only story.” A sobering Washington Post editorial from January 19 provides some context today. And I want to quote it at length:
After one frantic last flurry of legal maneuvering, the State of Utah succeeded in having Gary Gilmore killed at 8:07 o’clock Monday morning. The execution was carried out, according to those who were there, about as efficiently and effectively as such things can be. None of the four persons who fired the fatal shots missed. Mr. Gilmore, true to his word, did not flinch. Plenty of blood spilled, as always will be when a human being is shot to death.
Although the country was spared the spectacle of a public shooting, its citizens were drenched in thousands of words that attempted to describe the scene in utmost detail. Some of this was moving, and some of it was cheap. We, at least, found all of it profoundly distressing: having been spared for a decade the ordeal of reading about how civilized nation [sic] puts a convicted prisoner to death, we had almost forgotten how awful it is. And we had almost forgotten as well the hysterical outpouring of court orders and counter-orders that precedes all such affairs. Midnight judicial hearings, hasty airplane trips and frantic telephone calls – things that make a farce out of the orderly pursuit of justice – are as much a part of capital punishment as are bullets or gas pellets or electrical switches.
Finally, the Post implores the American public – “we” – to
think about the legal and moral squalor of the Gilmore case. By “we” we mean the rest of us – the executioners, the prison officials, the judges, the jury and the public as a whole. Mr. Gilmore was dispatched, after all, in our name. You could probably argue that as a killer of two men, Mr. Gilmore was beneath the lurid fate that the state of Utah afforded him. But the rest of us should have been above it.
So it was on that Monday morning in Utah, in an abandoned tannery behind the prison, known as the Slaughterhouse, that Gilmore, loosely strapped to a mahogany office chair in front of a wall of sandbags, freshly shaven and wearing a black T-shirt, white pants, and red, white, and blue sneakers, was asked if he had any last words.
“Let’s do it,” Gary Gilmore said. More precisely, as Time reported on January 31, 1977, “Gilmore peered around the cold, harshly lit room, stared at the warden for a moment and finally said, ‘Let’s do it.’” Then the prison chaplain, Reverend Thomas Meersman, performed last rites. From Time:
Gilmore remained calm as the state medical examiner pinned a target over his heart. Nor did he flinch when the doctor fitted the black corduroy hood over his head. Then the priest placed his hand on Gilmore’s shoulder. Tilting his head, the condemned man, who was reared as a Catholic, spoke his last words: “Dominus vobiscum [The Lord be with you].” Replied Father Meersman: “Et cum spiritu tuo [And with your spirit].”
Five local police officers served as executioners. They stood twenty-six feet away from Gilmore, hidden behind a curtain with five slits cut into it, out of which they aimed the muzzles of their rifles. They used “.30-.30 deer rifles, four loaded with steel-jacketed shells, the fifth with a blank” – ensuring that none of the five men could know for sure who had fired the fatal shot.
The warden motioned with his hand and “four bullets tore into Gilmore’s heart, twisting his body, which then turned limp. Blood slowly poured out, staining the bullet-pocked chair.” And, as The Washington Post reported above, Gilmore “did not flinch” when he was shot. Other prisoners, hearing the noise, began to scream and curse from their cells nearby. “Two minutes later, at 8:07 a.m. on Jan. 17, Gary Gilmore was declared dead.” Time continues:
Gilmore’s body was quickly removed and rushed to a Salt Lake City medical center. After a three-hour autopsy that included the removal of eyes, kidneys and pituitary glands for scientific research, his remains were sent to [Gilmore’s uncle Vern] Damico, who, according to Gilmore’s wish, had them cremated. The following day, as Gilmore had also wished, his ashes were scattered from a plane flying over Provo, Utah, where six months ago he had committed the murder that led to his execution. The chair in which he had been executed was burned.
Born in Texas in 1940, Gary Gilmore came into contact with the criminal justice system early in his life. In 1952, at age 12, Gilmore moved with his family to Portland, Oregon. At 14, he started stealing cars with friends, an activity that resulted in his first arrest. After getting caught a second time for the same crime, Gilmore was sent to MacLaren Reform School for Boys, a youth correctional facility, in Woodburn, Oregon; he was released a year later. Again, after a 1960 auto theft charge, he was sent to Oregon State Correctional Institution, where he spent another year. In 1961, Gilmore’s father was diagnosed with lung cancer; he died a year later, in July 1962 while Gilmore was in Rocky Butte Jail, back in Portland, for driving without a license. After a guard told him about his father’s death, Gilmore tried to commit suicide.
Later, in 1964, Gilmore was labeled a “habitual offender” and sentenced to fifteen years in prison for assault and armed robbery. He was sent to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, Oregon. However, a prison psychiatrist diagnosed him with “antisocial personality disorder with intermittent psychotic decompensation” and he was granted conditional release in 1972, to live part time in a halfway house in Eugene, Oregon, and study art at a local community college. Gilmore never registered for the art classes, and, a month later, he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery again. Because of violent behavior in prison, in 1975 Gilmore was transferred from Oregon to a maximum security facility in Marion, Illinois. He was paroled in April 1976.
He then moved to Provo, Utah, to live with a distant cousin named Brenda Nicol. On July 19, 1976, Gilmore robbed and subsequently murdered Max Jensen, a gas station employee in Orem, Utah. The next night, he robbed and murdered Bennie Bushnell, a motel manager in Provo. Gilmore shot both men in the head. While disposing of the pistol, he accidentally shot himself in the hand. Brenda, Gilmore’s cousin, alerted the police after he called her to ask for bandages and painkillers for his wounded hand. Utah State Police intercepted Gilmore as he was driving out of Provo; he didn’t attempt to escape.
Dan Wieden was born five years after Gilmore, in 1945. He also grew up in Portland, Oregon – where he later co-founded Wieden & Kenndy, in 1982. (Portland is also right next to Beaverton, Nike’s hometown.) In a 2015 interview, Wieden elaborated on his inspiration for “Just Do It”:
I stayed up that night before [presenting to Nike] and I think I wrote about four or five ideas. I narrowed it down to the last one, which was “Just do it.” The reason I did that one was funny because I was recalling a man in Portland. He grew up in Portland, and ran around doing criminal acts in the country, and was in Utah where he murdered a man and a woman [sic; two men], and was sent to jail and put before a firing squad. And they asked him if he had any final thoughts and he said: “Let's do it.” And for some reason I went: “Now damn. How do you do that? How do you ask for an ultimate challenge that you are probably going to lose, but you call it in?” So I thought, well, I didn’t like “Let’s do it” so I just changed it to “Just do it.”
So, almost a decade after Gary Gilmore’s execution, Dan Wieden changed “Let’s do it” to “Just do it” on behalf of Nike and the rest is history. But within that moment of copywriting inspiration, in that small decision, in that act of appropriation, lies energy that I don’t think has been properly explored.
After Art & Copy came out, Wieden’s revelation occasioned some industry fanfare, but it was mostly framed as an ad-nerd curio, an example of the outside-the-box thinking and forehead-slapping simplicity that is typically found behind such genius ideas. Although a variety of articles have also noted the “surprising,” “sinister,” or “morbid” beginnings of what Campaign magazine called in 2015 “arguably the best tagline of the 20th century.”
Morbid indeed. “That was not the version that I heard when I arrived at Nike,” says Liz Dolan, the former Nike marketing director, in Art & Copy, referring to the Gilmore inspiration. “I’m sure they didn’t want anyone to really know that that was the genesis of the phrase.”
I’m sure they didn’t. It’s unsavory in the extreme and makes Nike seem even crasser than it was/is. In 2018, for a story about Colin Kaepernick’s post-controversy Nike spot, The Washington Post reached out to Dolan (who left Nike in 1998) again about the origin story of the famous line. Like she recalls in Art & Copy, the line’s origin was not widely talked about within Nike, even after its success. “It never came up,” she tells the Post. “It was sort of a funny thing inside the company.”
It’s also revealing that Wieden had the savvy to keep his inspiration to himself until 2009, when the tagline’s legendary status was far beyond reproach. In the 2018 Post piece, Dolan, though no longer a Nike employee, seems to sense that some soft-touch damage control is called for. She defends Wieden, saying, “Certainly, it wasn’t a question of Dan being inspired by Gary Gilmore, but rather, it was about the ultimate statement of intention. It had to be personal.”
This defense is hardly a defense, and in a way is more damning than Wieden’s original admission. Of course Wieden was inspired by Gilmore. That’s literally what happened – as Wieden said in 2009, “Actually, the inspiration for this came from a man that was about to be executed for murder in Utah” – but it’s also beside the point. What Dolan seems to want to mean is that Wieden wasn’t inspired by Gilmore’s personality or his life of violent crime – only that he was drawn to the rebellious energy inherent in Gilmore’s decidedly unsentimental last words. (And, to be fair, Wieden did change the phrase.) But even this is disingenuous: his last words have no meaning except that they are his last words. The words are tied to the man and his entire life that led up to his speaking them. Decoupled from Gilmore, “Let’s do it,” as a phrase, is meaningless. But in the context of facing down a firing squad, “Let’s do it” (or “Just do it”) does certainly become, if you want to use the phrase, “the ultimate statement of intention” – or at least it’s pretty shocking. Especially as a brand’s tagline.
Worse, though, is the idea of “the ultimate statement of intention.” What is meant by this? As it stands, Dolan seems to be saying that the ultimate statement of intention can be no less than accepting your execution at the hands of the state with a laconic, arbitrary three-word response. Surely she means to equate this serious acceptance with other heroic Nike-speak – like standing for something, having convictions, never giving up. Like Nike’s Kaepernick ad says, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Once we begin to see that this kind of language – so prevalent in Nike’s advertising and in advertising generally – stems quite literally from a murderer condemned to execution, we start to get into choppy territory.
In a twisted way, Dolan has acknowledged in her above statement that now because the Gilmore connection is more widely known, Nike’s tagline has become even more resonant. “Just Do It” then is truly the ultimate statement of intention. Buying a pair of shoes is implicitly tantamount to coolly accepting your imminent death – a rawly rebellious act if there ever was one. “Just Do It” “wasn’t about a company telling you what to do,” Dolan tells the Post. “It was a company telling you that you know what the right thing is to do.”
And, like Dolan says, “It had to be personal.” At the very beginning, “Just Do It” was exactly that. As one advertising-watcher put it, “Just Do It” was “imperative, impatient, presumptuous and a little rude. This was not the sort of thing consumers had heard before.” It spoke to people directly: the extreme position articulated apparently longed-for consumer sentiments. And as Art & Copy makes clear, after the launch of “Just Do It,” both Nike and Wieden & Kennedy were “totally shocked at the impact of it.” Wieden explains his surprise at his line’s popularity, saying,
I think what happened, and it was sort of – like a lot of things in life, sometimes it’s the most inadvertent things that you don’t really see. People started reading things into it much more than sport.
Dolan agrees, saying the tagline “seems to have struck such a cultural nerve.”
Let’s look at some aspects of this “cultural nerve.” From about 1984 to the early-1990s the American sports apparel market was highly competitive. This period, known popularly as the “sneaker wars,” saw Reebok and Nike, plus a host of smaller brands like Adidas, Fila, L.A. Gear, and more, constantly battling for market share, mainly through one-upping product innovations and massive advertising spending.
Nike enjoyed some major victories during the sneaker wars. In 1984 Nike signed 21-year-old Chicago Bulls rookie Michael Jordan – for around $250,000, an unheard-of amount at the time (later, in 1989, Jordan signed a 7-year contract with Nike for approximately $20 million). The success of the sponsorship was hardly a forgone conclusion, but thanks to Jordan’s own fast-growing iconic status as a basketball player and Nike and Wieden & Kennedy’s seemingly endless hip advertising innovations, the partnership quickly became one of the most important and valuable in marketing history.
In 1985, Nike launched the Air Jordan sneaker line, and by the late 1980s, advertising gold was struck again with the on-screen pairing of Jordan and NYU grad and filmmaker Spike Lee. Lee’s 1986 film She’s Gotta Have It attracted Wieden & Kennedy’s attention because his character, Mars Blackmon, wears Air Jordans throughout the film. As Wieden & Kennedy copywriter James Riswold recalls, he was struck by the Mars Blackmon character “who so loves the man Air Jordan and the shoes Air Jordans, when he has the chance to sleep with the girl of his dreams he won’t remove his Jordans.”
The agency reached out to Lee immediately to see about working together. Lee agreed to do commercials with Jordan, and he was given more or less full creative control. The first “Mike and Spike” spot aired in 1987. The fast-talking, black-and-white ads worked wonders: the revolutionarily cool combination of Michael Jordan, Spike Lee, Air Jordan, and the 1988 introduction of the holistic “Just Do It” tagline cemented Nike’s identity as the epitome of hip and aspirational. And, thanks largely to these advertising efforts, Nike gained market lead in 1989. And, as communications professor Catherine Coleman notes, “More than that, these campaigns became deeply engrained in American culture and vernacular.” But Nike became both “a badge and a casualty of urban cool”: by the late 1980s, the “sneaker wars” had unfortunately taken on a more literal meaning.
Death has doggedly attached itself to Nike more often than one might expect. From the late-1980s to the early-1990s, teenagers around the country were murdering one another over sneakers and other pieces of sports apparel. As Coleman writes, mass media at the time was “full of reports about youth – specifically black, urban youth – killing each other for Nike’s Air Jordans.” The killings began around 1983, but seriously escalated after 1988 and continued into the 1990s. In 1990, Sports Illustrated published a cover story – “Your Sneakers or Your Life” – seeking to understand “who’s to blame” for the tragic phenomenon. The piece, written by Rick Telander, begins with a famous quote from one of the “Mike and Spike” spots – “Is it the shoes? Money, it’s gotta be the shoes!” – before outlining, in detail, some of the recent cases, many of them involving Nikes:
For 15-year-old Michael Eugene Thomas, it definitely was the shoes. A ninth-grader at Meade Senior High School in Anne Arundel County, Md., Thomas was found strangled on May 2, 1989. Charged with first-degree murder was James David Martin, 17, a basketball buddy who allegedly took Thomas’s two-week-old Air Jordan basketball shoes and left Thomas's barefoot body in the woods near school…
“We told him not to wear the shoes to school,” said Michael's grandmother, Birdie Thomas. “We said somebody might like them, and he said, ‘Granny, before I let anyone take those shoes, they'll have to kill me.’”
Also in 1989,
Raheem Wells, the quarterback for Detroit Kettering High, was murdered, allegedly by six teenagers who swiped his Nike sneakers. A month later, 17-year-old Tyrone Brown of Hapeville, Ga., was fatally shot in the head, allegedly by two acquaintances who robbed him of money, cocaine and his sneakers. In Baltimore last summer, 18-year-old Ronnell Ridgeway was robbed of his $40 sweatpants and then shot and killed. In March, Chris Demby, a 10th-grader at Franklin Learning Center in West Philadelphia, was shot and killed for his new Nikes.
And in April 1989,
16-year-old Johnny Bates was shot to death in Houston by 17-year-old Demetrick Walker after Johnny refused to turn over his Air Jordan hightops. In March, Demetrick was sentenced to life in prison. Said prosecutor Mark Vinson, “It’s bad when we create an image of luxury about athletic gear that it forces people to kill over it.”
Nike products were by no means the target in every case, but by dint of their “relentless” and highly desirable advertising, they loomed largest in the consciousness. The Air Jordan – a “product touched by deity,” as Telander puts it – was also one of the most expensive athletic shoes on the market, selling for about $120 (the Reebok Pump was $170). Telander asks Michael Jordan – who throughout the 1980s had taken care to keep his public persona that of the “all-American role model” – what he makes of the sneaker killings. “I can’t believe it. Choked to death. By his friend,” Jordan says of the Thomas case.
“I thought I’d be helping out others and everything would be positive,” he says. “I thought people would try to emulate the good things I do, they’d try to achieve, to be better. Nothing bad. I never thought because of my endorsement of a shoe, or any product, that people would harm each other. Everyone likes to be admired, but when it comes to kids actually killing each other” – he pauses – “then you have to reevaluate things.”
This was a highly fraught period, and as Coleman notes, between “February and May 1990, there was an upsurge of media attention on and debate about athletic and Nike-related crimes.” Critics argued that sneakers represented status that was “either implanted or fostered by advertising, and Nike and other sneaker companies were directly targeting and selling overpriced shoes to kids who couldn’t afford them.” At one point, Telander asks rhetorically, “Could any respectable U.S. corporation support the use of its products in this way?” Officially, he writes, the answer was “absolutely not” but, more candidly it seemed to be more like “you better believe it.”
Liz Dolan, Nike’s head of marketing, makes several appearances throughout the sneaker war period as well, mostly playing defense. In on statement about the murders, she says, “It’s a little unfair to blame us, a sneaker company, for the problems in the inner city. What we can do is put forth positive role models.” This studied naïveté didn’t seem to placate anyone. A week later, The Washington Post’s Tony Kornheiser “challenged Michael Jordan to use his position to influence industry prices of sneakers in an effort that he felt would minimize the conflicts on the streets.”
Dolan appears in the Sports Illustrated article, too; she is referred to as “director of public relations for Nike.” Asked about the influence “drug dealers” and their popularity in culture may have in setting fashion trends and accounting for some of the killings, Dolan repeats Nike’s anti-fashion refrain: “Our commercials are about sport, they’re not about fashion.” She adds, “You can quibble about our tactics, but we don’t stand for the drug trade.” True enough. But they apparently didn’t exactly not stand for it, either. Dolan again:
Everybody wants us to do everything. It’s naive to think an antidrug message on the shoe box is going to change anyone’s behavior. Our theme is “Just do it!” because we want people playing sports, because they’ll need more shoes. The healthier people are, the more shoes we’ll sell.
And there were even charges at the time, mentioned in the Sports Illustrated article and by Coleman, that Nike encouraged reps to actively court drug dealers “as a lucrative market.”
Later, Telander writes, Dolan “suggests that the people who raise the alarm that Nike… is exploiting the poor and creating crime just to make money are bizarre and openly racist.” But media figures at the time did essentially pose some version of that argument – openly racist or not. A 1990 New York Times Magazine article suggests that “sneaker advertising, especially the ‘Just Do It’ campaign, may bear some responsibility for violent incidents involving sneakers costing more than $100.” And John Leo, a U.S. News & World Report columnist, quoted in The New York Times Magazine article, said, “‘Just Do It’ means one thing to the middle class, and something else to people mired in the ghetto.” Leo’s thinking here is certainly racist. However, the idea that “Just Do It” can mean totally different things to discrete groups of people is – to this day – exactly Nike’s reasoning for why the “Just Do It” tagline has been so successful.
“Exploiting the poor and creating crime just to make money” is something no company would want to be seen doing, but the issue is more complicated than Dolan claims. (And, as a side note, “exploiting the poor… just to make money” is perhaps what Nike is best known for, having been accused, since the 1970s, and more famously in the 1990s, of using overseas sweatshops to produce its products.) Appropriation, and even exploitation, looms large here – and advertising certainly played a part. Coleman notes that during the height of the sneaker wars and Nike’s popularity the
social discourse on the increasingly mainstream images of African-Americans, initially pleased with the depictions of a positive, successful and empowered black man in advertising, exploded with charges of exploitation and manipulation.
In his 1993 book Small Acts, Paul Gilroy, Director of the Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London, argues that Mars Blackmon’s appearance in Nike’s ads – even though Lee’s reprising his own original movie character – is an insidious example of cultural appropriation by a corporation:
Through that character above all, Lee set the power of street style and speech to work not just in the service of an imagined racial community but an imaginary blackness which exists exclusively to further the interests of corporate America.
For his part, Spike Lee, quoted by Telander, says he sees his relationship with Nike as a tool for good: “I want to work with Nike to address the special problems of inner-city black youths, but the problem is not shoes.” And Phil Knight, Nike’s co-founder and CEO, distanced the company from any such cynicism – kind of – saying of the Michael Jordan deal, as quoted by Coleman,
Distinctive personalities are important, but you don’t have to be loved. And color really doesn’t matter. A lot of people have written that we’ve signed these black stars to sell to kids in the inner city. We didn’t… We are looking for great personalities who cut across racial lines.
Telander ends his article by asking, “So what should the shoe companies, the schools, the advertising industry, the endorsers, the media, parents – all of us – do about it?” He then quotes another iconic catchphrase from the Mike/Spike spots: “Do you know? Do you know? Do you know?”
No one is seriously saying that Nike is “responsible” – in the “caught red-handed” sense – for these acts of violence, which were often committed explicitly in the name of their brand. But, as Elijah Anderson, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, tells Telander,
Advertising fans this whole process by presenting the images that appeal to the kids, and the shoe companies capitalize on the situation, because it exists. Are the companies abdicating responsibility by doing this? That’s a hard one to speak to. This is, after all, a free market.
Continuing to plumb the more sinister depths of this “cultural nerve” Nike “seems to have struck,” we move forward, to 1997. In a large house in a gated suburban community in Rancho Santa Fe, California, 39 devout followers of a cult leader named Marshall Applewhite, known to his acolytes only as “Do,” voluntarily ingested a lethal combination of Phenobarbital and vodka, mixed with some applesauce or pudding. To be sure of their mission’s success, they also placed plastic bags over their heads before lying down on their cots.
The event was the “largest mass suicide on U.S. soil and certainly one of the worst in U.S. history,” writes sociologist Janja Lalich in her book Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults. In the book, Lalich describes the event and the cult itself in detail. The 39 members had died peacefully, it seems, in three groups, over at least two days. The ages of the dead ranged from 26 to 72; Applewhite was 66. Eight had been with the cult only a few years, but the remaining 30 had been devoted since the mid-1970s. The cult had lived in the Rancho Santa Fe house for the last six months. But who were they?
The dead were, Lalich writes, members of “the Bo Peep cult – a group that had been in an out of the news since 1975.” Although, now they “would forever be known as the Heaven’s Gate cult, a name based primarily on the name of their Website.” In the 1970s, Lalich writes,
Applewhite and his “cosmic mate,” Bonnie Nettles (known to her followers as Ti, pronounced tee), had announced that a ship would arrive from outer space and rescue them from the earthly nightmare. They and their followers were to be taken to an eternal paradise, which they called Next Level or Level Above Human. It was their version of the “Kingdom of Heaven,” but unlike many other conceptions of heaven, this one was believed to be a physical place. In this way, Ti and Do and their followers believed they would escape death and live forever in their celestial home –from whence they believed they had been sent to accomplish a mission here on earth.
Applewhite and Nettles (who died in 1985) had converted their first followers in 1975. They lived nomadically, recruiting at campuses and other such places. And all the time, Lalich writes,
they believed that leaving earth was imminent, that salvation was just around the corner. But years passed, and more years passed. The spaceship did not arrive to retrieve them, despite much anticipation and many rumored appearances by members of the group. As devotees came and went, the details of the group’s core belief system were altered to accommodate certain events, real or imagined.
In spring of 1997, people all over the Southern Hemisphere watched as the Hale-Bopp comet, recently discovered in 1995, flew through the sky. The average person was excited by this “wonder of nature,” Lalich writes, but the members of the Bo Beep cult, now living together in Southern California, were “straining to see the comet for a different reason.” They had
heard through the grapevipe of UFO buffs that a spacecraft was trailing the comet. Astronomers had been trying to debunk that idea since it surfaced in November of the previous year, but the rumor spread rapidly across the airwaves and the cyberwaves.
Members of the Bo Peep cult were excited that a spaceship might be nearby; Applewhite was convinced this “was the signal they had been waiting for.” Lalich writes,
an air of excitement prevailed, an anticipation unlike that felt before. This time they were sure; the ship was coming to take them home. They decided to take the steps they had been talking about for several years.
In late March 1997, following up on on a tip from a former acolyte named Rio, Police officers entered the Rancho Santa Fe mansion and discovered the 39 bodies. Judging by the odor, they had been dead for at least a few days. Lalich notes it “was a shocking scene even to veteran police personnel and coroners.” Walking through the house, the police found each body lying on a different small bed or cot. They were all dressed in the same black uniform, with a colorful triangular patch that read “Away Team” sewn to the upper sleeve. They all had the same bowl-cut haircut. And all but two were covered with a diamond-shaped purple cloth. Each member wore the same brand-new pair of black Nikes.
Instantly, the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide became an unavoidable subject in the media. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, Nike found itself at more or less its pop cultural center. On April 21, 1997, Advertising Age published a piece called “An Endorsement Nike Didn’t Want.” It begins, “The recent mass suicide of Heaven’s Gate cult members has brought some unwanted attention to athletic shoe and apparel maker Nike.”
The piece also mentions matter of factly that the “39 victims all wore identical Nike sneakers, visible in news footage of the grim scene.” Nike’s presence at the pop cultural center of this horrible event seems to have been unusually sustained. Ad Age writes, “Nike officials are hoping that interest in the cult will eventually wane and that late-night talk show hosts and comedians will give it a rest.” But, they say, “there is no sign of that yet.” The near-constant pitch of late night show and news coverage “generated a thousand hacky variations of Nike’s slogan ‘Just do it.’” And, on April 12, 1997, a couple weeks after the bodies were discovered, Saturday Night Live aired a fake commercial made up of real news footage of the dead cult members wearing their matching Nikes. The slogan at the end of the fake ad read: “Keds. Worn by level-headed Christians.” In a statement, Nike dismissed the skit.
Upon closer inspection, however, the cult’s connection to Nike is slightly more than arbitrary. In a piece published on June 8, 1997, Dick Joslyn, an ex-Bo Peep member who left the cult in 1990 and made the talk-show interview circuit following the mass suicide, says that the “Nikes worn by members who committed suicide were sort of a parting joke, a playful reference to the Just Do It advertising slogan.”
In 2015, the sneaker website Sole Collector looked deeper into the shoe’s selection. They wanted to know why the Decade (the name of the model) was chosen. Sole Collecter connected with ex-Bo Peep members “Mark and Sarah King, who left the group in 1987,” and who still run the Heaven’s Gate email account. In the article, Sole Collector’s Brendan Dunne writes that Mark and Sarah promptly responded to the website’s emailed questions:
When we asked about the sneakers, the response explained that the Nike Decade was a budget option that appealed to the group’s leader. “They turned out to be a look that Do [bka Marshall Applewhite, the group’s founder and leader] and the Class liked,” the response read. “They were also to able to get a good deal on them. It was a combination of factors that made the sale happen, not because of a particular model or brand.”
In 2017, Newsweek published a piece about the Heaven’s Gate suicide and, specifically, Nike’s role in it. Titled “How Nike’s Decade Became a Cult Shoe, in the Wrong Way,” the piece assumes a jokey tone, asking, “What’s the proper dress code for a mass suicide?” and referring to the style choices of Heaven’s Gate members as “health goth.” Newsweek writes that Nike quietly discontinued the Decade model after the Heaven’s Gate event, and today deadstock pairs sometimes show up on eBay for thousands of dollars. In 2016, the event was referenced in Frank Ocean’s music video for the song “Nikes,” which features a man dressed in black wearing Nike Decades, lying under on a bed under a diamond-shaped purple shroud.
Obviously, the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide “provided some uncomfortable attention for Nike,” Newsweek wrote in 2017. “Most brands would rather not be associated with a cult; they’d much rather be the cult.” In Nike’s aforementioned 1997 statement on the suicides, Jim Small, a company representative, said, “We’ve heard all the jokes. The Heaven’s Gate incident was a tragedy. It had nothing to do with Nike.”
But didn’t it – in some way? Surface level logic hides metaphysical violence. Our culture’s first impulse is always to explain-away, to turn everything into a joke, or a business opportunity, or – ideally – both. But by Nike’s own stated concept of the heroic, isn’t the largest mass suicide ever to occur on United States soil “the ultimate statement of intention”? Isn’t Heaven’s Gate the most literal, and most serious, example of what it means to “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything”?
Dick Joslyn said the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide was “a supreme act of faith, and in that sense it was their triumph.” Maybe Nike could use that? After all, isn’t “Just Do It” lifted from – inspired by – just such a traumatic and violent incident? Had Gilmore’s execution occurred within Nike’s literal orbit – had, for example, Gilmore been wearing Nikes when he was executed (he was actually wearing Asics, I believe, but Nike was founded in 1964, and he easily could have been wearing a pair of them instead) – would we get the canned PR statement instead of the brilliant tagline? “We’ve heard all the jokes. It was a tragedy. It had nothing to do with Nike.”
What is the difference? On an alternate timeline, ten years later, would some alternate version of Dan Wieden hear about the Heaven’s Gate suicides and respond positively to the cult members’ steadfast conviction? Maybe he would even do something with Applewhite’s own chosen name, Do. It’s pronounced doe, but it could be changed. What other chilling historical or recent-historical events are there, waiting to be mined in the name of commerce? I can think of several inappropriate examples.
Newsweek writes, “Nike can’t be blamed for the suicides, but the brand is forever attached to the tragedy, whether they like it or not.” By their own hand, the brand is also forever linked to the state-sanctioned execution of a murderer. Whether they like it not.
Back in 1988, no one could have known how successful and influential “Just Do It” would become. It very well could have failed, and only aired for a couple weeks. In fact, Wieden recounts in the 2015 interview that most people at Nike at the time hated it, including Nike co-founder Phil Knight. “I went to Nike and Phil Knight said, ‘We don’t need that shit,’” Wieden recalls. Luckily for Nike – and Wieden & Kennedy – Wieden stuck to his guns: “I said, ‘Just trust me on this one.’ So they trusted me and it went big pretty quickly.”
Wieden also explains, in Art & Copy, his ambivalence about the line, the attitude of the rest of the Wieden & Kennedy team re: the “Just Do It” idea, and their general obliviousness about the Gilmore connection, stating, “None of us really paid that much attention. We thought, ‘Yeah that’d work.’”
Surely there is some post-success faux-blasé in Wieden’s statement, but, practically speaking, that indifferent attitude does a disservice to Nike. And – more spiritually, yet more to the point – such casual treatment of a deeply troubled man’s possibly unstable last words does disrespect to the lives of the men Gilmore murdered, all the others he had hurt or wronged, and, finally, to Gilmore himself – whose inspiration Wieden had chosen to follow. As The Washington Post writes in 2018, “The story of Gilmore has been long forgotten by most. But his final words live on in a manner no one would have imagined.” No doubt Gilmore would be thrilled by his contribution to global culture. Just as Wieden obviously is.
Anyone can take anything and use it anywhere else. That basic act of appropriation is how culture is created: material encountered in the world is reworked into something new. But one should at least be deliberate and thoughtful in that act, and careful to treat the associated inspiration accordingly. The ahistorical and flippant carelessness of Wieden’s co-optation of Gary Gilmore’s last words betrays the business world’s unethical myopia and pushes this particular act somewhere over the line of decency.
Of course sources can be taken and manipulated – and they should be. But the result of such manipulation must do justice to its source, and “Just Do It” does not reach that threshold. Advertising especially has to be careful when attempting appropriation, because when the primary objective is profit and not meaning or understanding or beauty, any piece of work, no matter how effective, cannot do justice to its antecedent.
I’m not advocating for anti-appropriation. Far from it. But I am suggesting that maybe our actions have consequences outside of the purely transactional-equational. I’m not saying that the slogan is haunted, but at the same time it’s worth considering the possibility.
Live Bait 🐠
Wieden & Kennedy posted a statement in support of Black Lives Matter on its website, writing, “If you do not support this sentiment as a client, we’ll gladly support you finding another agency”; the agency’s clients include Nike, Uber, Ford, Coca-Cola, P&G, McDonald’s, Fox Sports, and ABInBev.
Spurred by an insensitive June 1 episode of “The Bill Simmons Podcast”, The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, and the media company’s management more generally, has come under fire for a lack of staff diversity; after the episode aired, Ringer Union tweeted, “In 2019, 86% of speakers on The Ringer Podcast Network were white. We have zero black editors”; this week, Simmons compounded the recent backlash by telling The New York Times, “It’s a business. This isn’t Open Mic Night.”
The “Facebook boycott” – companies pausing/ending ad spending on Facebook – is growing, and now includes Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Unilever, and more; also, see “the hard truth about the Facebook ad boycott.”
Four episodes of 30 Rock that contain scenes where actors are wearing blackface will be removed from Amazon Prime and Hulu, and will be made unavailable for purchase elsewhere; in a letter to the streaming platforms, Tina Fey, the show’s creator, referred to blackface as “race-changing makeup.”
Vice published a ridiculously thorough look at the bizarre recent movements of “free speech absolutist” Brian Rose and his online interview show “London Real.”
A Twitch user, who is following “786 female streamers and 0 male streamers” on the service, sued the company (which is owned by Amazon) and is seeking $25 million in damages for exposing him to “overly suggestive and sexual content from various female streamers.”
Microsoft is shutting down Mixer, its Twitch competitor.
DTC brands have turned their attention to household appliances, starting with air conditioners.
Focusmate is a new “virtual coworking” app.
WarnerMedia is planning to sell Atlanta’s CNN Center.
Connecting, a “remote comedy” about “friends trying to stay close through video chats,” was picked up by NBC.
After getting pushed from September to late November, The Comey Rule, a two-part, four-hour series about James Comey, with Jeff Daniels as Comey, will now air before Election Day.
Irresistible, Jon Stewart’s new political comedy, is out now.
Kanye West is working with The Gap.