*supercollider

Congrats to Patrick Soderstam of Sweden, who was recently crowned winner of the inaugural Nike 1/1 art competition at the 1/1 exhibition in Basel!

1/1 started with the goal of providing something of value to the community that wear Nike Dunks and something they’d be interested in talking about. With that in mind, our team at AKQA worked with Nike to create a prize for street-inspired art to help provide exposure for emerging artists, and an online gallery and physical exhibitions across Europe with the goal of collecting some of the best of this art for people to experience either in person or in full-screen glory.

My favourite part of the program was watching all of the individual country teams in Europe engage with people in their markets via 1/1 in their own ways.

A few examples:

UK
The UK team held live illustration competitions at dozens of art colleges and creative spaces throughout London.

Portugal and Spain
The Iberian country team curated their own exhibitions using stars in creative disciplines from film through sport.

Russia
The Russian team held a launch party with themed art in Moscow.

Italy
And in Milan there was a gallery space and giant art billboards.

The countries’ energy and ideas made all the difference. And this is one of the keys in the shift from interruptive to engagement marketing.

It’s no longer about top-down assets coming out of global which the regions simply localize. It’s more often about providing a creative framework that gives the local markets the flexibility to engage people in that the way they believe will be most effective in their own countries.

The results can be amazing, and you end up with variations on a main theme that can drive best practices and go on to inform the next iteration of the framework.

The days of iron-fisted global brand control are over, but the alternative is likely to produce much richer, locally relevant, and exciting results.

Technorati Tags:
brand, engagement, marketing, nike, value