In the video “Nike: Find Your Greatness” is a series of Nike commercial campaigns that shows every people around us can be extraordinary. The campaign was run during the 2012 London Olympic Games. It was very surprising that this series of campaigns did not put focus to sport professionals or athletes, instead, Nike filmed ordinary people and people with disabilities. The video says that if you want to be great, you, and only you could find the way. This series of campaigns from Nike are not product based, but its main purpose is to encourage and inspire people to go out to work out.
Find Your Greatness video showed various clips of people in different activities. Some of the activities are played by people with disabilities or physical disadvantages; other activities are played by people who are not professionals but very proficient with their skills. They are great with these activities because they never give up no matter how many time they fell and they always got up on their feet.
The most critical element of this video is that the Nike Company published this Find Your Greatness video during the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games on TV. The intended audience of this campaign was everyone who had a chance to watch this video. The main purpose of this campaign was to inspire everyone by showing that the greatness can be achieved by ordinary people.
Find Your Greatness video utilized pathos that starts with a boy around 10 years old who has obesity problems. From the video, we could see that the running boy was pushing himself very hard. We could see the boy’s shirt is wet and his breathing is very heavy. The boy believes that success belongs to the persevering of hard work. And it is believed that the boy will be fit and healthy if he keeps running. This video is very motivating that audience would feel proud of the boy trying to push beyond his limits.
Find Your Greatness video utilize logos by showing the viewer that if one works hard, then you will reach greatness. The video relates to the average person, letting them know that anyone can successfully reach greatness. This is being conveyed through the voiceover, which encourages others to be more proactive. This video utilizes logos in a very straightforward manner which is expressed from start to finish. For example, it says “Greatness is not a rare DNA strand,” which tells the viewer that greatness is achievable, it is not something out of the ordinary.
Find Your Greatness video use ethos in an unorthodox manner. This is because the video uses a term called “greatness” and justifies the meaning of the term with average people. The video isn’t utilizing famous athletes to get their point across. Moreover, instead of using extravagant language and and music they get their point across with a simple voiceover. This video is simplistic which almost seems to contradict the meaning of greatness, but they get the point across to the “average” person.
Tom Hardy has used the final film that entails several represented participants from the previously released advertisements. Each of this participants induces a different cultural model that represents a specific social group, which assists in developing complex identities of the participants to bring out the underlying message in the video avert. It is notable that the participants represent a marginalized or a minority group. This group consists of people with disabilities, women, children, and people of color. The use of marginalized or minority groups, for instance, has opposed the common Hollywood belief that able-bodied persons, whites, adults, and attractive people are the ones that should appear in advertisements. The use of marginalized groups in this film gives credit to Hardy and manages to convince his audience that not only the average and attractive human being is capable of prospering in any professional and nonprofessional field has it has been depicted in many other advertisements that target audience that like sport.
Hardy goes further to make this advertisement more appealing to the audience by presenting to them a category of participants who they are not familiar with like the disabled persons appearing in advertisement focusing on achieving success. Most people already recognize the depicted gender and this number is rapidly increasing as exhibited by the current statistics. The use of this category of participants will comfortably relate to any marginalized group contrary to those depicted in Hollywood Standard (King 123). A group’s representative in this advertisement does not have to match a person’s specific identity to count for a successful representation. In this context, the advertisement offers the information that every person has his or her own potentials to achieve success in whichever means they decide. You do not have to be the same as well-established Olympic champions such as Hussein Bolt to be successful or have unique ideas like other people in order to be successful. The participants in this advert serve two purposes which include telling the story and offering the audience an opportunity to insert themselves into the story. Hardy makes the audience feel as part of the advert thus giving the opportunity to find greatness in themselves.
Hardy uses the keyword of monologue to make this advertisement relevant for the targeted audience. This word is “greatness” that is softly spoken throughout the advertisement running time. In the “jogging” scene it is repeated four times. The director’s apparent reason for repeating this word several times is to occasionally evoke it in the audience’s mind. Additionally, the use of pronouns particularly personal ones like “we” have added credit to the use of this monologue. While the use of such pronouns are also common in other advertisements, and it signifies a sense of authority (Hardy n.p), in the case of Nike’s advertisement, it entails both the message the narrator, sender and receiver and all other participants represented. This sense of unity is significant in this advert as it creates a personal connection with the audience while at the same time stressing that achieving greatness is within every person’s reach (Fourie 66). The only instant when the authoritative personal pronoun “you” is used in the advert is when the narrator tries to convince the audience that they should forget about the old-fashioned perception that greatness is a rare privilege or talent.
In giving his work more credit, Hardy has employed the use of stylistic features that make advertisements more appealing to the targeted audience. He employs linguistic parallelism, a term coined by Cook (2001), not only to make the advert more appealing and interesting to the audience but also to improve the content of the message being communicated (Jeffries 31). For instance, the narrator uses a phrase such as “We’re all capable of it…” (Hardy n.p), not just to make the advert more interesting, but to stress on the point that greatness is not a unique feature that is only associated with a certain small percentage of the population, but anybody can achieve greatness. By convincing the audience that they can all achieve success if they need to, Hardy has made his advert more appealing and convincing to his audience.
The use of unique camera technologies and visuals effects also makes this advert more appealing to the audience. The screen is evidently horizontally divided into two levels. Above is a pinks and pale blues of the sky at dawn, and below is an empty grey road lined with greenery. At the beginning of the advert, the audience is first attracted by a small amorphous figure that moves towards the camera as the camera simultaneously moves backward. In this scene, no sound effect is heard apart from chirp of cricket that gives an impression of an early quiet morning. As the camera moves away from the object, the audience finally realizes that it is a person running. At this point, footstep sounds can also be heard. Here, the director challenges the audience’s mind by detaching their minds from what they have been believing to be an object to a subject. The camera angle also plays a unique role in determining a specific relationship between the represented and interactive participants. This is a unique feature as it creates an equity between the protagonists, and at the same time increases audience propensity to relate to the participants. Hardy has employed this feature with the focus of conveying the advert’s message that any person can achieve greatness no matter of his or her social status.
In conclusion, Nike created an effective campaign that affected everyone around the world. Although Nike is a company that vouches for athleticism, the ad did not target athletes, but instead it targeted the average person. The ad encouraged people to be more proactive about reaching greatness and that anyone can do it. Their utilization of pathos, logos, and ethos created a message that wasn’t conveyed traditionally. They utilized pathos by showing a boy running and struggling, yet persevering. They utilized logos by simply showing us average people who are being proactive. And finally, they utilized ethos in a manner that most people wouldn’t first expect when using the term “greatness”. All in all, Nike’s campaign was one that was very effective and taught everyone that greatness can be achieved by anyone.
