The Nike Curse: Marketing Own Goals Come Back To Haunt. Adidas Strike Gold. The Future Of Soccer Marketing

***Updated Tue Jun 29 2pm PST***

Nike's feature length 2010 World Cup ad, starring in order of appearance:


Write Your Future: marketing own goals

Didier Drogba
Sustains flukey broken arm in warmup match, barely able to compete. 1 garbage time goal when it was too little too late against Brasil.

Fabio Cannavaro
Led defending champions Italy to epic crash out of first round featuring a draw with new Zealand and a loss to powerhouse Slovakia. Booed at airport on return to Italy.

Wayne Rooney
England draw 1-1 with USA thanks to goalkeeper blunder of the year, draw 0-0 with Algeria, barely scrape through to knockout stage where they are annihilated by Germany. 0 goals.

Franck Ribery
Fresh off a sex scandal involving an underage call girl, helps France to epic failure on the field and surreal & embarrassing reality-show level drama queen nonsense off field. 0 goals.

Ronaldinho
Cut from Brasil's 23 man squad. Watching World Cup and home, and eating. 0 goals.

CRonaldo
Lots of stepovers, lots of stop, drop, and roll. Lots of pleading his case to the referee. 1 meaningless goal in garbage time against North Korea in 7-0 romp when his team was already up 5-0.

Nike executives are crying. Pretty embarrassing for them that for the next 2.5 weeks this is all they have to show in all of those commercial breaks they have already bought. Ouch. The interesting part is that as poorly as the 6 featured players did, those players who got a whopping 2 seconds of screen time combined- Landon Donovan, Tim Howard, Andres Iniesta, Gerard Pique, and Cesc Fabreags, did or are doing just fine, thank you very much. Weird, isn't it?

Meanwhile over at Adidas, they are jubilant and realizing they may have found the new formula: use celebrities and sprinkle in soccer stars to hedge against such a fail risk. After all, Snoop Dogg, Noel Gallagher, Beckham, and Obi-Wan weren't really outplayed by the 6 featured Nike players, were they? Look for future ads to use the Adidas formula to mitigate risk.


The future of soccer marketing: minimize failure risk.