Nike’s ‘So Win’ Won the Super Bowl

Monday, 10 February 2025

Well, the Philadelphia Eagles, of course, won the actual Super Bowl, winning in a romp so one-sided that they would have embarrassed the Chiefs less if they had pantsed Patrick Mahomes at the 50-yard line. But the second contest is for best commercial. And my vote goes to Nike.

The problem with modern Super Bowl commercials is they’re bland. Offensively bland. It really makes no sense to me. The commercial time is famously expensive — Fox was supposedly selling 30-second spots for last night’s game for $8 million — but the sponsors who buy that time tend to squander it with absolute mindless pap.

Fewer and fewer sponsors each year, it seems, attempt to bring something actually interesting. Something different. Something with some punch. Something that’s actually funny. Something that makes you actually feel. You don’t have to make a genuinely artistic short film, like Apple’s Ridley-Scott-directed 1984 spot heralding the introduction of the Macintosh — the ad that is justifiably regarded as the best commercial ever made. Some of what I’d list among the best Super Bowl ads ever were silly gimmicks that revelled in their abject silliness, like the “Bud Bowl” commercials (featuring anthropomorphic bottles of Budweiser and Bud Light playing football) — very far from “high art” but very fun, and created specifically to be shown once and only once, in the context of the Super Bowl. One simple measure is whether the ads are memorable. Most of the ads in last night’s game I forgot by the time the game resumed after the break.

I don’t know why anyone would book and commission a Super Bowl commercial if they weren’t trying to do something or say something memorable with the spot. Still, though, there are always at least a handful of standouts.

My favorite yesterday was Nike’s “So Win” spot, a heralding of its own — not for a new Nike product, but for the explosion in interest in women’s sports, featuring WNBA phenom Caitlin Clark and a few other top women’s athletes. Gorgeous black and white cinematography. Led Zeppelin’s rollicking “Whole Lotta Love” as the soundtrack. And a righteous manifesto of a message, delivered with pitch-perfect gusto by narrator Doechii. Nike, it turns out, hadn’t run a Super Bowl ad since 1998, and they came back with a banger that to me reinvigorated the Nike brand. They’ve been in a bit of a free fall and I think this ad was intended as much to inspire Nike employees as it was to female athletes and sports fans. (Shades of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign.) I’ve re-watched this spot a few times while writing this post and I like it more each time.

Honorable mentions:

  • ChatGPT’s branding spot, positioning AI alongside historical breakthroughs in technology. Loved it. I think it was supposed to be a mystery until the very end of the 60-second spot who the ad was for and what exactly it was about, but I guessed “ChatGPT” about 5 seconds in. I kind of hate making a third comparison to an old Apple ad, but ChatGPT’s spot does evoke — not as a rip-off, but homage — the 90-second “There are a thousand no’s for every yes” opening film from WWDC 2013, perhaps the nadir of Apple’s post-Steve-Jobs grief.
  • Stella Artois: David Beckham learns that he has a twin brother, named Other David Beckham, whom his parents abandoned at birth in America. Beckham sets off to meet him. Don’t read anything more about it, just watch. Good kicker at the end, too.

Dishonorable mention:

  • Tubi is a streaming platform owned by Fox. Apparently it’s existed since 2014 and has been owned by Fox since 2020, but I’d forgotten it existed until this week, when it was in the news as the streaming platform carrying the Super Bowl. Fox ran a couple of house ads, intended to promote Tubi, about a young man born with a head shaped like a cowboy hat. Memorable, yes, but the execution was revolting, not funny. The message I took was that Tubi is the streaming app that will make you feel grossed out.