BobDylan_Isaiah - The Monday Morning Memo

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In 2020, the NIKE brand team shifted from brand marketing to digital marketing and from brand enhancing to sales activation. All in.

Because of that, the CMO of that time made a few epic moves:

shift from CREATE DEMAND to SERVE AND RETAIN DEMAND, which meant that most of the ad spend was directed to those who were already Nike consumers (or “members”).
massive growth of programmatic advertising investment (as of 2021, to drive traffic to Nike.com, Nike started investing in programmatic advertising and performance marketing at double or more of the share of resources usually invested in the other brand activities). For sure, the former CMO was ignoring the growing academic literature around the inefficiencies of investment in performance marketing/programmatic advertising, due to frauds, rising costs of mediators and declining consumer response to those activities. Things that were suggesting other large B2C companies – like Unilever and P&G – to reduce those kind of DC investments in the same exact period… Because of that, Nike invested a material amount of dollars (billions) into something that was less effective but easier to be measured vs something that was more effective but less easy to be measured. In conclusion: an impressive waste of money.

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- Peter Yang