Project: Nike North America led a Play Inside campaign from the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic to encourage people to move. It was Nike’s way of living its motto to “Just Do It” during a difficult time for people worldwide. Nike NA wanted @Nike YouTube to be the lead platform in its campaign, which is where I came into the picture. The series achieved 10 million views and represented Nike’s mission “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.”

My role: I led enterprise platform strategy for YouTube, which included content strategy. In my role, I would work with teams to realize the content they intended to publish on YouTube to achieve their varying brand and business goals. For this project, I collaborated closely with Nike NA, creative partner Wieden+Kennedy and production partner Media Monks to develop a campaign on the fly. Leveraging the YouTube strategy that I had set, as well as research into livestreaming best practices, behaviors and tools on YouTube, we built a program that continued to adjust throughout the series as we gained more learnings.

I co-created the strategic approach for the series, developed the narrative arc that the series need to reach for every episode, led the partnership with YouTube that included promotion, editing and technical support, managed the livestream mechanics, incorporated a beta version of YouTube’s commerce capabilities and led the development of a 2x-weekly recap that was delivered to Nike’s Global and NA marketing leadership.

Project Superpower: We lived and breathed Nike’s mission statement: “to bring inspiration and innovation every athlete* in the world.” The inspiration was bringing Sport and movement to people every Saturday morning during a time in need. The innovation came from the way in which we re-imagined how to operate a livestream on YouTube. The use of livestreaming served as inspiration internally, as well, as Nike EMEA and Nike Japan stood up their own YouTube livestream efforts. Digital product teams at Nike used our project as one of the pillars for their internal livestreaming strategy, later leveraged for Nike’s SNKRS app. As well, Fast Company cited Nike’s livestreaming at the start of the pandemic as one of the reasons for Nike’s placement on their Most Innovative Companies list.