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January 29, 2005

We Can't Protect This House!

Nike does battle with Under Armour in its Nike Pro(tm) campaign

I imagine there must be nothing quite like the experience of being a start-up company that, following years of struggle and sweat to bring a successful product to market, finds their idea co-opted by their largest and most powerful competitor. You're at once both elated (Check it out! Our idea really was good! We're legit!) and horrified (Holy crud! Now that they took our cool idea, we're toast!).

Such was the lot of Under Armour last Sunday when Nike unveiled the launch campaign for its Nike Pro line of apparel. (Or should I pander even more obediently to the Nike marketing department and use the adjective "performance" in front of apparel?) Started by a former University of Maryland football player in 1996, Under Armour has forged a product line and brand around the principle of high technology/ high performance gear for high performance athletes. Since its founding, the company has expanded from the initial line of microfiber undershirts into six different product categories, and have signed equipment deals with numerous high-profile NCAA and professional teams, as well as several Hollywood studios (Under Armour appeared in Any Given Sunday, The Replacements, and the short-lived-but-dearly-missed Playmakers show on ESPN).

If none of this is ringing a bell (and if you don't watch a LOT of sports, it won't), then we can fast-forward to the brand-defining moment for Under Armour: their 2003 "We Must Protect This House" TV spot. The imagery was as stark as it was obvious -- a football team prepares for a game, washed-out colors tinted towards red and black, strapping their forms into torso-hugging superhero leotards logoed with the Under Armour crest, adolescently smacking each other in the head, all the while building to the climax of the entire team huddled around a lone figure (shot from above, of course) screaming to the heavens, "WEMUSTPROTECTTHISHOUSE!!!" Right. We must. Protect. This house. Where "protect this house" = "we should win our home games." All very serious, of course. The phrase was already floating across the neutral zone from "unattributable quote" to "full-blown sports cliche"; its commercial deployment only sealed the deal. Everyone now knew about protecting one's house, and if you were interested in protecting said house, you had better get some Under Armour.

(Though perhaps worthy of a separate posting, the trend in US consumer sports advertising towards more and more non-sports-related metaphors and product positioning is something I find pretty troubling. Though I understand that many athletes' celebrities transcend the boundaries of sports, watching a few big-budget soccer ads reminds you of just how far afield American sports imagery has wandered. Even the goofiest soccer ads -- and one of the best spots ever involves killer samurai robots -- are fundamentally about the game. That is, Nike, Adidas, etc., try to connect with the skill and joy of playing soccer. American sports ads? They tend to be about the personalities contained within the media context of sports -- Air Jordan, AI, King James, Michael Vick, T-Mac, Tiger, etc. -- and their sundry attributes, and very rarely about connecting with the consumer's experience of the actual sport or even game. But again, that's a longer conversation.)

Thus, it is a testament to Under Armour's success that sports equipment giant Nike has decided to co-opt both their product design and product positioning with its Nike Pro for Athletes line. In case you haven't seen the ads (they're in heavy rotation on sports TV and plastered all over espn.com), they feature sci-fi/ horror-movie style and almost-but-not-quite-familiar celebrity visages. We face the athletes in a bare, narrow, fluorescent-lit hallway, each squaring up to the camera in the chosen stance of their sport -- clutching a football, brandishing a baseball bat, staring down a hitter. We flash from athlete to athlete as the lighting strobes on and off. About two-thirds of the way through, we see interspliced images of, for lack of a better term, scary monsters of the dressed-up B-movie variety (skulls, scorpions, insects, etc. -- think City of Lost Children meets Nine Inch Nails meets that part in Willy Wonka when they're on the boat ride in the trippy tunnel) as each of the athletes' faces is replaced by a different mask, corresponding to each scary monster.

The athletes are, in turn, transformed from vaguely familiar (yet perfectly intimidating) muscle-bound dudes into the sorts of fellows you'd hope not to meet on a battlefield in Mongolia circa 1200 CE. There's erstwhile deodorant pitchman Brian Urlacher wearing a cube of barbed wire. There's LaDanian Tomlinson with three heads and two nasty antelope horns. There's Albert Pujols sporting the title prop from The Mask. There is Ben Roethlisberger become Destro-Skeletor (with a solitary elongated horn). There's Torii Hunter as a Venus Flytrap. And there's Mariano Rivera wearing Ray Stantz's headgear from Ghostbusters, though in this case it conjures up creepy scorpion associations. The spot then flashes the tagline: "For Warriors." Swoosh. The end.

I wish I could say that it was all amateurish and cliched, that Nike had failed in their attempt to subsume Under Armour's positioning. But no. The Nike ads are gorgeous. In my delirious game notes from the NFC Championship game in ALL CAPS is the phrase "FOR WARRIORS! HOW DO I PURCHASE!?!?!" The spot was fantastic the first time, and it's been fantastic ever since. Regardless of the actual product, the aesthetic is fantastic. The imagery is the perfect assembly of borrowed pop-culture signifiers -- visuals half-remembered from the detritus of schlock horror movies, reconstituted in an aggressive and uncomfortable form. We've seen the faces before in our nightmares, or at least what's been sold to us as what scary nightmares should look like. (And we won't worry about describing the line between those concepts -- too po-mo.) Even better, the half-remembered images are elegantly complemented by the half-familiar faces of the about-to-be-famous athletes involved. We've seen them on Sportscenter, but not in a commercial (except for Urlacher). And it totally works, both aesthetically and viscerally. "Put your game face on"? I was sold. Forget protecting the house: I wanna be a warrior!

Still, as slickly produced and executed as the campaign may be (and as punishing as it might prove to Under Armour's business), there is something very unseemly and distasteful about the exuberance with which the ad's theme is trumpeted. As if the war allusions and cliches tossed around by the sports journalists, commentators, and TV talking heads aren't enough, now we need the advertising to adopt a war motif as well? Though it's certainly been argued before, this ad is just the latest reminder of just how inappropriate war-related sports metaphors can be -- ESPECIALLY WHEN THERE'S AN ACTUAL WAR ON. (Missing your pro football violence fix this Sunday? Tune in to the Iraqi elections on FOX News! Carnage and destruction all the live-long day!) Yikes! The ads are beautiful, sure, but you can make beautiful advertising without some primal appeal to our lust for scary masks and broadswords. It's easy to forget that sports are entertainment, an escape from the scary results of real struggles, real wars. Win or lose, everyone gets to eat that night. No one's house gets blown up. When Under Armour co-opted the battle imagery, we could forgive them as an upstart trying to claw their way in; when Nike does it, we have to shake our heads and ask why they couldn't try a little harder. Not only are they plagiarizing the upstart's product and positioning, but they're doing it in an undeniably vulgar way. Nike, I shake my finger at you!

(If only I didn't so desperately crave Ben Roethlisberger's Destro-Skeletor mask for Halloween.)

Posted by thatkid at January 29, 2005 4:05 PM under Biznass

January 29, 2005

We Can't Protect This House!

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