The Thrill of a Sneaker-Ad Account

Four agencies have sneaker campaigns related to Philadelphia.

The thunder of feet down a basketball court, the percussive thump of the ball on the hardwood, the shouts of the players, and, finally, the soft swoosh of the ball as it slides through the net.

Did we say swoosh?

That swoosh. It's more than a sound.

It's an icon, a V-shaped symbol of the way one company, with one product, can, well, just do it - and in the process create a whole new way of thinking about sneakers and the way they are marketed.

Fifteen years ago, a sneaker was little more than a canvas shoe jammed into a gym bag, an anti-aromatic device that lent, how shall we say, a certain perfume to its environs.

Now, though, in the world of marketing, and due in no small part to Nike's prodigious advertising, the lowly sneaker is hot, hot, hot.

Just as the latest Nike Air Jordan shoe is the object of desire for teenage basketball hotshots, a sneaker advertising account is the hoop dream of agencies wanting to show off their creative hot shops.

So pervasive are Nike, and its swoosh logo, in the culture of sneaker advertising that it cannot be ignored, whether the agency is a big-name shop headquartered in New York or Chicago, or a tiny firm tucked in a former bank building in Philadelphia.

In East Germantown, players shoot baskets in a faded gym on Chelten Avenue.

Down a corridor, past peeling paint and leaky ceilings, Nike commands the court at the Lonnie Young Recreation Center, where only a few players wear Reeboks or Adidas.

"It has to look good and feel good," said Chris Dorman, 16, who prefers Nike shoes.

In 1996, thanks to players like Dorman, Nike commanded 43 percent of the $7.5 billion wholesale athletic-shoe market in the United States. Reebok ran a distant second at 16.1 percent, according to Sporting Goods Intelligence, a Glen Mills newsletter.

It's winter now, and the game in East Germantown has moved indoors. But marketers in the corporate headquarters of athletic-footwear companies are beginning their push for the big spring selling season.

In the last two weeks, four advertising agencies have launched, or announced plans to launch, sneaker campaigns connected, in some way, to Philadelphia. Reebok and Fila feature Philadelphia athletes; Puma and And 1, a fledgling basketball apparel company headquartered in Rosemont, hired Philadelphia ad agencies. The And 1, Fila and Reebok ads include Philly footage.

The dynamic that underlies all sneaker advertising is fashion versus function.

Nike has come down squarely on the side of function - creating a brand identity strongly linked, through the use of top-notch celebrity athlete endorsers, to high performance.

"If you start off as a sport brand, you are not as susceptible to the vagaries of the fashion business," said Bob Carr, editor of Inside Sporting Goods, a trade newsletter. "As long as you are authentic sport, your shoe can be worn by drug dealers and stockbrokers."

"The reason our competitors fall down is they think it's a fashion business, but it's not," said Jim Ward, global account director for Nike at the shoe company's advertising agency, Wieden & Kennedy, in Portland, Ore. With only a brief interruption, Wieden & Kennedy has handled Nike since 1982.

All other sneaker advertising, experts say, references Nike's work - even when it ignores it.

Take, for example, the four shoe campaigns with Philadelphia connections:

Reebok. Reebok and Nike had been neck and neck in campaigns trying to capture the zen of top-notch athletic performance - Nike through its "Just Do It" message and Reebok through its long-running "Planet Reebok" series.

Reebok's new campaign, released Thursday, abandons the "planet" concept in favor of, as one marketing executive said, "autobiographies broadcast within television programs and sports events."

In an unusually long 90-second spot by Chicago's Leo Burnett agency, Sixers guard Allen Iverson, the top 1996 NBA draft pick, talks about his past, about the thrill of having his own shoe, and how it feels to make it to the big leagues.

Fila. The Super Bowl spot with Sixer Jerry Stackhouse concentrates on performance - but with a twist. Instead of photographing Stackhouse shooting hoops, it shows him dribbling along a steel girder on a skyscraper. In a surprise ending, he plummets to the ground as his parachute opens and displays Fila's slogan, "Change the Game."

"If you copy somebody, that's the kiss of death," explained Peter DePasquale, the senior vice president at FCB/Lieber Katz Partners in New York.

"At the same time, you can't ignore Nike, you can't go off and be your own little brand, then you'd be a little niche player. We try to look to Nike and watch what they are doing and counterpoint," DePasquale said.

During the Atlanta Olympics, while Nike staged aggressive commercials pushing the rigors of competition, Fila spots showed its stable of athletes dancing in celebration.

And 1. Because And 1's products aren't licensed by the NBA, the Brownstein Group, a Philadelphia advertising agency located on South Broad Street, couldn't use any NBA footage to show off its star, Minnesota Timberwolves point guard Stephon Marbury.

Instead, in a spot filmed at the Pattison stop of the Broad Street Subway, Marbury dribbles the ball into a subway car as it pulls into the station, manhandles it past an old lady, through the riders and out another door before the train leaves the station.

The idea is that people who wear And 1 shoes think, live and play basketball all day long - even when they're waiting for the subway. "All Day Long," is the slogan.

Puma. "It's supposed to look like bad science fiction from the '60s," said Steve Grasse, president of Gyro Worldwide, the Philadelphia agency housed in a former bank on Walnut Street. Although Puma's commercials include top-name European track athletes, they aren't shown in their usual milieu.

In the wordless commercial, designed to air in many European markets, bad guys garbed in black steal the miracle green gel that creates Puma's new cell technology - a foamless cushion for the sole.

The athlete, dressed as a scientist, laces on Puma sneaks and pursues the techno thieves, even though they've escaped on a motorcycle. The last frame shows the athlete's leg as he jumps for the motorcycle, the angle of the leg juxtaposed with the leaping puma on the shoe's logo.

Back at the gym in East Germantown, the players say they are not impressed with sneaker advertising.

Unlacing his Nikes, Earl Spearman, 25, said advertising might affect teenagers - he said he used to buy a pair a week when he was younger.

Now, though, performance counts. "You need good ankle supports, good air in the shoe. That makes a difference - on this kind of floor in particular," he said, laughing, as he pushed his foot against the worn wood.

The $800,000 that Fila spent on Jerry Stackhouse's skyscraper shoot didn't persuade Spearman's pal, Tyrell Henry, 26, to trade his Nikes for Filas.

"I like the commercial," Henry said, resting on a bench, "but not the sneaker."

Maybe the players aren't impressed, but the ad agencies are.

Advertising experts say that sneakers have become a must-have product category for agencies, along with automobiles, beer and soft drinks.

"It is a whole lot more interesting than selling a can of peas," said Roger Lavery, associate professor of advertising at Virginia Commonwealth University's Ad Center.

"These are high-visibility, high-profile campaigns," Lavery said.

"They can focus on the attitude of athletes, which is rich with emotion and very powerful. It's edgy, very competitive and it lends itself to some wonderfully powerful images - the human drama of competition - as opposed to getting into the specific benefit of the shoe."

Rippling sinews on powerful, sweat-glistened bodies don't hurt either.

"It's a sexy account and it gets a lot of coverage," said Vonda LaPage, an executive at Fila's agency.

Just landing such an account sends signals to two important groups of people interested in creative work: potential clients and potential employees.

The And 1 account brought in more work - a high performance wool-sock maker and a golf-club manufacturer - to the Brownstein Group, which had already established itself in sports by handling the Flyers hockey team.

Since Brownstein landed the shoe account a year ago, the agency added about 10 people, two of whom concentrate on And 1.

"We wanted the account pretty badly," said Marc Brownstein, president. So badly that they moved all the furniture out of the conference room and converted it to a basketball court - complete with hoops.

"Having a sneaker brand puts our regional agency onto the national playing field," Brownstein said. "Sneakers is a cool category."

Gyro's Grasse said his agency's revenues increased 20 percent when it landed the Puma account in September.

Two months later, Bausch & Lomb approached Gyro to handle a job involving Benetton, the international clothing retailer. The fact that Gyro had Puma, an international account, helped the agency land the Bausch & Lomb business designing advertising for sunglasses, Grasse said.

Grasse hired five people to handle several new clients, including Puma.

"At the end of the day, creative people at ad agencies are artists, and they want to do work that is rewarding on that level," Grasse said. "This is a product that allows you to do real creative work."

Bob Carr, the editor of Inside Sporting Goods, thinks much too much is made of the creativity of sneaker advertising.

"Most of it is one guy after another doing slam dunks," he said. "If you are not bored after the 14th slam dunk, there is probably something wrong with you. You probably have a lobotomy."