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In this video, we are going to talk about Nike and their awkward current state, Adidas, and their cultural comeback, and the marketing around the World Cup. A lot on soccer, a little bit on basketball, but most importantly, the state of the world as cultural titans and smaller brands battle it out around the sporting zeitgeist. Look, I remember crystal clearly the moment my older brother showed me this, the Nike All-Stars vs. Devils ad. Nike entering the arena into soccer marketing in the most major of ways, right? Creating ads nothing like we'd ever seen before, pure cinema, drawing the absolute best out of the sport, marketing at its highest level. And when I was growing up, it seemed like they were on a run that would be completely unstoppable. I had branded posters hanging in my room. When they dropped an ad, it was a discussion point. You assumed the great athlete would be a Nike athlete. And this was their soccer strategy. Sign Brazilian athletes, make cinematic ads, and establish cultural urgency in the United States and globally around a sport that it didn't have deep roots in. Adidas was rooted and they were counter-positioning. And in their time, they dropped incredible ad after incredible ad. This one, World Cup 1998, Brazil at the airport, equally as important viewing, right? In a completely different flavor and way. All fun and skill and expertise and stardom while being distinctly Nike. Simple, fun. But perhaps my favorite ad is one that I bring up all the time when talking to brands now, and we talk about cinematic content, right? You see now streetwear brand, athletic brands, they're all doing real cinema. They're all putting together lookbooks, making their own movies, their own shows. And this Nike first-person POV directed by Guy Ritchie ad that puts you in the position of this player in this situation inside Arsenal was not just unique at the time, but is incredible for anyone who wants to immerse themselves inside a brand world. A truly masterful piece of advertising. But fast forward to today, that's not where Nike's at, and that's not what's happening in the culture. For most people, it's synonymous with mediocre. The shoes are okay. You wouldn't ever buy the clothes. Millennials have strong feelings about the brand. They grew up with it. They have hope for it. I have hope for it. But the reality of it with the consumer is something different. And to understand it, we should go away from soccer and into basketball, where they have one of the hottest athletes of the moment. If you look at the shoes they have, this is the shoe they have for Victor Wembenyama right now. They're simply bad. I had a moment with my son when Luka was traded to the Lakers from the Mavericks, when he was asking, does he have shoes? He was aware of the idea of the shoes and Jordan shoes. And I remember distinctly showing him the Luka shoes in all the styles and being, yeah, I'm cool, bro. And I'm trying to put that in perspective of people that grew up in the era I did, where it would just be them taking an L or doing that just seems not even comprehensible. But this is it. Look at the Jordan Luka 3. Look at this. Who is wearing this? How is this aspirational? How does one of the top athletes in one of the biggest markets get represented by Nike for something like this? And it's not just one athlete or two athletes. Everyone on the Jordan roster, everyone on the Nike roster, perhaps best exemplified by the honestly complacent trash of the Devin Booker shoe, trying to badly reinvent what came before it in a really unique market with a unique player who could have done so much more. One of the only players with a decent shoe in presentation, Ja Morant. But even then, they had to go through a sea of whack shoe after whack shoe to get to anything interesting and respectable. And to the point now, when you go on to the football cleats section of this, and you scroll through these now, there is very little here, if anything, that you'd want to wear, that you'd be excited about. And I find this interesting that this is where this brand is at. When we are in one of the most interesting times in design, possibly ever, where there's so much talent, there is so much high quality, and they choose again and again to put out stuff that is mediocre at best. So what happened? I'm going to talk for a bit about how jerseys began to take over culture and how that began to actually take share away from these big brands used to sell you athletics. We'll talk a bit about campaigns and relevancy in the modern era, the brands that are taking this share and the unique things that they're doing. And then go into the marketing behind the World Cup and why this is such an important and pivotal moment for both Nike and Adidas on the trajectories they're going, one up and one down. So the cultural cachet of sportswear is at an absolute all-time high. And the soccer jersey perhaps most exemplifies that. Brands like House of Errors that I'm wearing right now took that fandom that used to be expressed through a Nike garment and made it simply more interesting. And that became a major trend. It's gone all the way down into brands like PacSun. And you'll see lots of brands that are actually passionate about the jersey use it pretty extensively inside what they're doing. Kid Super, another example I frequently point to, where the founder is passionate about soccer. And you see it again and again as a motif inside the clothes that they put out. But all of this, this embracing of this, used to be traditionally focused on these major athletic brands. But now the symbol isn't the jersey of the player itself. It's it as a fashion concept. That's an arena that Nike doesn't play in at all. And it's not that other brands haven't noticed. One of my favorite stories of the last few years is Umbro taking a more fashion forward approach with the line they've done with Slam Jam, right. And they came out and they launched it in 2025 with this chainmail jersey, right, which is the perfect example of the abstraction we have of these artifacts we have around sports. We want to purchase. We want to remember. We want to represent us. And what can be done with a vision around that. And when you look at these, you go, OK, this creative director working on this gets taken by Umbro, but not Nike. And you can see this brand was able to get life breathed back into it by making really interesting sportswear. And if you just go through the Slam Jam collections, there is more interesting things happening here than across the entire Nike site. And I say this to highlight that it is a talent war that we are in right now. We have more independent talent than ever. Better designers, more creative directors, the ability to sample and test more things, more inspiration, more people working together. But since the Virgil Abloh era, none of that has landed at Nike. And at the same time, you have the fanatics world, right? The world of cheap jerseys. My only fanatics anecdote is that's one of the most despised brands by generations, right. You have, I remember at a Super Bowl party recently back in Feb, kids had angry fanatics stories and
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Through the Slam Jam collections, there is more interesting things happening here than across the entire Nike site. And I say this to highlight that it is a talent war that we are in right now. We have more independent talent than ever. Better designers, more creative directors, the ability to sample and test more things, more inspiration, more people working together. But since the Virgil Abloh era, none of that has landed at Nike. And at the same time, you have the fanatics world, right? The world of cheap jerseys. My only fanatics anecdote is that's one of the most despised brands by generations. Right. You have, I remember at a Super Bowl party recently back in Feb, kids had angry fanatic stories and adults had angry fanatic stories. How they'd gotten a bad quality or not arrived on time or they'd been disappointed. There's been this cheapening of the official merchandise significantly by how bad of a brand that is and how much they've tarnished the fan experience that it dirties the brands in the middle and has made people go to more of these independent people that obviously care about it. Well, at the same time, we've seen the teams themselves actually flourishing by embracing design. In Italy, multiple clubs are doing just an exceptional job. The merchandise performs and is more widely known than the teams in their actual games. And they're putting out better stuff at better prices than a lot of the actual brands. And both of these have done an excellent job with their releases. And perhaps most interestingly, the campaign has changed. All those big ads I showed you before were done by the same ad agencies that are still working on Nike campaigns. We still see that the last bastion of the millennial big catchy tagline, a key moment ad. They still operate in this more antiquated way. And what's happening is you are seeing the internet build around it faster. And a great example is this young guy, Asher Hyde, who after Wemby's games against OKC the other day, released mock-ups, right? It's just nano banana mock-ups of these ads are ruthlessly viral, hundreds of millions of views, where he's able to deploy a concept based on the nun iconography, the nuns that are at the sports games, at the Spurs games. But even that, just showcasing the size, showcasing him against other athletes. The creativity happens at a faster speed and done better by independents. And these brands are able to do with their own IP because they won't adapt their systems. They're locked in with these ad agencies that are antiquated, with these processes that are super behind. Those are the people that are desperately trying to catch up by watching the kind of videos, the stuff we have on our channel, and realizing they can't act like that. There's too much of a change. And you end up in this sea shift of brands that can act and brands that can't. But in the meantime, the campaigns are executed specifically by others. The personalities become the stars more than the brands behind them. How did we end up with a better Ja Morant ad from an AI creator, no matter how cursed you think that may be, than they got more interaction than anything the actual brand put out. And then we enter that relevancy moment too, with those athletes. Shohei Otani is with New Balance. Cooper Flagg is with New Balance. Anthony Edwards is with Adidas. There's more competition than ever, faster speed to move. And we have a company with incredible IP that is behind the ball constantly. Before we dive into the state of marketing, why the World Cup is so important, and what's happening as we speak, as we think about the soccer jersey as a pop culture item. As something fashion brands interpret, something where the elements are broken down and recreated and shared, where these lookbooks are looked at aspirationally from these teams and these releases, where brands are even creating fictional teams, the play with materials, the things I talked about. So last year, I'd worked on some concepts around this for some brand merchandise. And I pulled together dozens of vintage jersey designs, art direction, mood boards, and visual campaigns with football themes as part of the process, as well as a bunch of factories to make them. We ended up going with an alternative direction, this luxury collection you may have seen last summer. But I want to find a way to present this here and share a bunch of those resources. It's more than just a mood board or a link. So I went to Perplexity Computer and created a microsite from scratch that you can get here for free. It's a design resource, a factory resource. And so you'll see it has 38 campaigns, 100 jerseys, 16 manufacturers, mood boards, all live on this site with links you can use as a resource. If you ever wondered how it works to put something like this together, you can build that inside of Perplexity Computer. They have access to multiple different models for different functions. It can do deep research with one, it can compose copy with another, generate graphics, write, design, code, and deploy all in one interface you see here. So I gave computer the initial links and resources that I pulled. I asked it to pull a lot more. I could determine if I want to add or reject them. And then I asked it to build a complete browsable site with these different sections for mobile and desktop that I could present here as a design resource. In about 20 minutes, we went from concept to site. And you can see me asking it to change different specific things in here to go validate images and previews. I can just do this all inside the Perplexity Computer interface. If you've ever wanted any design inspiration around this niche now or for the future, you can check out the build in the description and you'll find the template and prompts I used you could use for compiling your own resource or building microsites with Perplexity Computer. All the links are in the description. I hope you find it super useful. And thank you so much to Perplexity for sponsoring this video. Before we get into this year's World Cup, I want to talk about running as an example of what's happening right now. Why this is such an important era to think about. So we have so many of these brands. If you look at why is Nike no longer the champion of running? Why are they not associated with running? Why have they even owned a fraction of the subculture the way they used to? And look at how specific these brands have gotten, right? So you have Satisfye and Satisfye is here collabing with Adidas. You have Minted New York dropping running shoes with Saucony and incredible gear. You have District Vision and all of these are niched in, right? District Vision owns the wellness end of it and they do it with New Balance. Satisfye has more of the Ed Hardy affliction vibe. Granted a little higher end because they're French. Minted is fiercely independent and personality driven. Bandit owns the underdog and the concept. They launched that unsponsored project went directly at something that felt very Nike saying, hey, we're going to give these athletes, these underdogs a chance. Tracksmith has collegiate. The casual user, the user just wants to have a shoe that looks good on, just took all of that, especially in the more suburban demographic. Hoka has the
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shoes with Saucony and incredible gear. You have District Vision and all of these are niched in, right? District Vision owns the wellness end of it and they do it with New Balance. Satisfye has more of the Ed Hardy affliction vibe. Granted a little higher end because they're French. Minted is fiercely independent and personality driven. Bandit owns the underdog and the concept. They launched that unsponsored project went directly at something that felt very Nike saying, hey, we're going to give these athletes, these underdogs a chance. Tracksmith has collegiate. The casual user, the user just wants to have a shoe that looks good on, just took all of that, especially in the more suburban demographic. Hoka has the trails. There is no subculture that Nike is able to own and the world is splintering into these subcultures. And so every one of these categories is up for grabs. Part of when I originally started this channel, it's giving away lots of factory links and how to build brand items because the opportunity is so large because every one of those big conglomerates is operating behind the ball. You are able to get market share from them. And it's not just DTC anymore. It's not just getting it online. You see more and more of these people opening up stores. Tracksmith has so many stores and doing run clubs in all these regions. I was in Tokyo. I wandered by a bandit store in Tokyo. The scale that these brands are able to operate at and a certain amount of speed is just extremely encouraging. When you look at the soccer landscape, this is where Adidas' advantage shows the most clearly. Adidas owns roughly 40% of the global football boot market. And with their actual kit deals, their relationships run extremely deep. They basically dominate that segment. And in 2025, they announced home kits for 22 nations simultaneously. They've splintered down as well. More and more smaller collabs, more and more regional. And each one of those 22 kits that they announced had its own design background, its own lore, its own campaign. That's what it means to operate in this modern landscape if you are one of those bigger brands, is to use your scale to operate lots of smaller campaigns the way the internet works in niches, in regionality, in algorithms. For the 2026 World Cup, Adidas has 13 nations, including Mexico and Argentina. Nike has 12, two of them being the host countries, which is why this lines up to be one of the more competitive moments of this. And this comes at a peak moment, right? Adidas has been football-adjacent fashion culture in a much stronger way than Nike. The Samba, the Gazelle, the Copa, those are all also related to the football world. And the way that any of Nike's dominance is more SBs, basketball, their newfound growth and success is attached to a cultural memory of the game in a way Nike's never really was. And so globally, Nike's market share is set to decline, not a huge amount, but a minor amount. And Adidas is set to rise, a small amount as well. But this World Cup is particularly important because it is Nike's backyard, U.S. and Canada. And with them set to own the host countries, you see Adidas came in with the strongest campaign possible from the start. So before Nike was even able to announce what they're doing with their campaigns, we got Timothee Chalamet at the peak of his moments, Messy, Bad Bunny, in a film that was, for the first time, something watched at the breakfast table with my family. Something on the par of what we saw in those Nike examples we had originally. And now whatever Nike does, as good as it is, and bringing out that star power, it's secondary to what they rolled out. I think it's worth talking about how this actually works. Why is this such an important moment? How brands that are both actually involved and involved on the side can hijack these big moments like the World Cup. So FIFA does a billion, 1.1 billion in sponsorships from this 2026 World Cup. Adidas pays for the tournament rights, Visa pays, Coca-Cola pays. Coca-Cola has been paying since 1976. So these are the official partners. Their logos appear on the broadcasts, corner flags, the match balls. They've bought the real estate around this. But that's not always the brand that walks away with the actual cultural resonance from the event. That just sets you up to make sure you have some guaranteed impressions. So in 2010 in South Africa, Adidas is the big FIFA sponsor, same way they are this year. And Nike is not an official sponsor. They never are. So they launched a film then with Kobe Bryant, Ronaldo, Federer. That went ultra viral, especially for that time, 7 million views or something. And they ended up with a Nielsen tracked buzz of 30.2% of the brand conversation around the World Cup. Adidas only had 14, even though they weren't the official sponsor. And they did that for maybe 10, 25 million on the campaign versus the hundreds of millions Adidas spent to sponsor the whole thing. Because there is so much attention and conversation around the few monoculture moments that we have left. It's why a Super Bowl ad is still worth the money for a lot of brands. It's so hard to get that many targeted eyeballs at one time. They have the ability to potentially spur a bigger conversation. Now, this isn't always just the big brands like this, right? So in 2014 in Brazil, Beats by Dre had a moment. They weren't a sponsor. They're not even a sports brand. And they'd actually just been banned by FIFA. Players could not wear those headphones because Sony was the official sponsor. So Beats launched a film during the pregame. LeBron, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne. Doesn't even mention the World Cup. Gets 23 million views. And the same rating system basically shows that Beats has more of an association with the World Cup than Sony, the actual sponsor. This is the virality move that we played. They also sent custom Beats in team colors to all the top squads in the tournament. And players kept wearing them despite the ban because they were hot. And then when Germany won the final, they gave the players 24 karat gold headphones delivered by Naomi Campbell, right? This is someone going for the jugular in a cultural moment. This is why, as we lead up to this, there's so much brand planning that goes into it. Because these official sponsorships only buy you access to the surface, right? The moment itself is just about who can direct human attention. And that's done through careful planning and thought and timing. Just like we saw with the Adidas. The Adidas fired early, knowing they could get ahead of the conversation, potentially be the first to dominate it. Anything Nike does now is in response to Adidas. Now, maybe they can blow it out of the water, but because it came out so strong, anything similar is another bunch of star power looks like a copy. They're preemptively getting ahead, knowing their competitor is down bad. Because guess what? Judging by Nike's recent track record, they probably don't have anything sick lined up. It's probably okay. And so the playbook for this,
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itself is just about who can direct human attention. And that's done through careful planning and thought and timing. Just like we saw with the Adidas. The Adidas fired early, knowing they could get ahead of the conversation, potentially be the first to dominate it. Anything Nike does now is in response to Adidas. Now, maybe they can blow it out of the water, but because it came out so strong, anything similar is another bunch of star power looks like a copy. They're preemptively getting ahead, knowing their competitor is down bad. Because guess what? Judging by Nike's recent track record, they probably don't have anything sick lined up. It's probably okay. And so the playbook for this, if you're actually looking at implementing this as a brand, because this goes to any event, goes to any new thing. If you want to think about how do you hijack something, the Boston Marathon, if you're a running company, if you see Bandit do this, a grip, CrossFit games, anything, three things. It's about relationships with the principals, not just sponsoring the events, about who is in there that you are able to work with to get attention, the actual players, the actual competitors, the actual people involved with the event. Because working with them outside of it can be just as impactful and likely cheaper. And then it's about having territory that the other people can't claim. Beats isn't competing for the ad that's on during the actual World Cup. They're competing for the tunnel or what people are wearing there. And then you want to create something that's worth sharing on its own terms, right? This Timothée Chalamet Adidas ad isn't just exciting because it's the World Cup. Again, it doesn't even mention the World Cup. It's interesting on its own. It's a short film. It's funny. It's creative. It has a lot of star power. Whether or not it's attached to the World Cup, it's worth sharing. And that's the mistake of just putting all the same creative or launching another ad or focusing direct on this is there's bigger ramifications now in terms of what virality can make. And right now in 2026, brands are expecting to double the social engagement in 2022. We're in a different world now. It's far more social, far more shareable. The ability to say, we're going to put out a campaign. We're going to get the conversation going. We're going to seed it with clips. We're going to get into a response. We're going to know that there's an algorithm building around it and act on it is crucial. You may have seen a video I put out a while back about Coachella. Why do so many brands spend so much money on Coachella? Because there's a Coachella algorithm. You consume some content about Coachella, just like the Olympics. And I put out videos around this. They did great. I had a video about Olympics. I had a video about Coachella. Because so many people are watching and viewing that content, whether it's a hate watch or a like watch, they show them more and more of it. The algorithms know this. They respond to it. They put it inside your feed and they test it to a lot more people. This happens at every big event. And this becomes an opportunity to hijack that, to sponsor a couple people to go, to release a jersey, to do X or Y collection related to it, to catch the tail of that algorithm, to get more views than you normally would. This is such an outsized opportunity for small brands who understand social media. I absolutely have to call it out. It's the same exact thing for creators as well. And all this goes back to big agencies not being able to understand it and leverage it, although they are getting better. Big brands have a hard time moving into this. And it is the time with the smaller people who can come around and move against the culture in different ways. And so I'm going to end with, what would I think Nike had to do to get back on track? So the first thing I think would be would be retire the SNKRS app. Sneaker culture, hype beast culture is probably the biggest negative implication and association with Nike now. So many people have used the SNKRS app and just never gotten the stuff they actually want. So the consumer now has a negative association with one of those top apps. Got to crush that. That has to go. And then when they do release it, do things like the limited, it has to just have more production. It doesn't have to be unlimited. But if someone wants something, you have to be able to let them get it. You will not be able to get the kids excited. You're not be able to get the collaboration scale, even know what works and what the depth is without more availability. You have to be anti-reseller culture. There are no people besides maybe crypto people who are looked down upon more than sneaker reseller, sneaker flipper. You have to remove that association. You have to actively work against that as that brand. You need to position that that is something they are never going to be able to support again. You should be able to get whatever you want from the brand at its own price. Resets with this new population who have such a negative association with these brand experiences. And with that comes an exiting of the C-suite, right? No one now responsible for marketing, for design, or for product. And thus, no one in the operations around that should be allowed to stay there. It needs to be a complete house clean. Same thing with the agencies. Every old agency has to go. None of them operate inside this world that we're in now. And does that mean more coordination, more campaigns, more failures, whatever? Yes, but there's no way you can keep winning with the same agency that you had 25 years ago. They do not have the juice to function in the modern era. I know. I go to these. I do these workshops at these major brands, at Fortune 500s, inside the household names. We talk about their marketing. We go through it. They know who they have, can't respond. They know they're behind. Most people just don't do anything about it. But with a brand where that lifestyle and the marketing is everything, you have to do something about it. Then fanatical focus on new silhouettes and actually incubating design talent that stays with the brand, actually documents what's happening and shares it. It cannot be the clothes vault. It has to be a story that Nike is telling with its designers, with its athletes, all in one amazing internet canvas that could be better entertainment than any other brand has. Nothing to care far more for the women's market beyond a few collabs and Skims, a handful of athletes. It feels like an afterthought and a design afterthought, and it's lost its purchase power with that demographic. But it's a complicated market there now with a lot of movement between those brands, the Lulus, the Allo's, etc., that potentially with some focus could get brought back. And lastly, to bring voices to social media. They need not just their Marcus Millioni, dozens of them. Unique people with perspectives inside the company are building their own brands or building subsections there. They're able to actually share with passion that
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entertainment than any other brand has. Nothing to care far more for the women's market beyond a few collabs and skims, a handful of athletes. It feels like an afterthought and a design afterthought, and it's lost its purchase power with that demographic. But it's a complicated market there now with a lot of movement between those brands, the Lulus, the Allos, etc., that potentially with some focus could get brought back. And lastly, to bring voices to social media. They need not just their Marcus Millioni, dozens of them. Unique people with perspectives inside the company are building their own brands or building subsections there. They're able to actually share with passion that story at a greater level. And frankly, I don't think they'll be able to do it. I think we'll see one of the great American brands get continually hacked and chipped away at into obscurity. It will remember what it was, and it will be more Kmart and TJ Maxx than anything else. And I hope that I'm wrong, but there's nothing that I've seen that was suggestible go a different way. If you're passionate about these kinds of topics, doing another creative direction webinar coming up here in a week or two, I will link down here where we run them as a community call where I talk a little bit and do a training. Then we all go through questions and Q&A and actually just workshop the things that are going on. So if you want to connect with other people that you're excited about this with and just get deeper into these topics and actually do some workshopping and talk about it, we'd love to have you then as well. We'll be documenting a lot more marketing around what actually happens during the World Cup. So you can find that on short form. I appreciate y'all so much for watching.
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soccer marketing in the most major of ways, right? Creating ads nothing like we'd ever seen before, pure cinema, drawing the absolute best out of the sport, marketing at its highest level. And when I was growing up, it seemed like they were on a run that would be completely unstoppable. I had branded posters hanging in my room. When they dropped an ad, it was a discussion point. You assumed the great athlete would be a Nike athlete. And this was their soccer strategy. Sign Brazilian athletes, make cinematic ads, and establish cultural urgency in the United States and globally around a sport
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that it didn't have deep roots in. Adidas was rooted and they were counter-positioning. And in their time, they dropped incredible ad after incredible ad. This one, World Cup 1998, Brazil at the airport, equally as important viewing, right? In a completely different flavor and way. All fun and skill and expertise and stardom while being distinctly Nike. Simple, fun. But perhaps my favorite ad is one that I bring up all the time when talking to brands now, and we talk about cinematic content, right? You see now streetwear brand, athletic brands, they're all doing real cinema. They're all putting together
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lookbooks, making their own movies, their own shows. And this Nike first-person POV directed by Guy Ritchie ad that puts you in the position of this player in this situation inside Arsenal was not just unique at the time, but is incredible for anyone who wants to immerse themselves inside a brand world. A truly masterful piece of advertising. But fast forward to today, that's not where Nike's at, and that's not what's happening in the culture. For most people, it's synonymous with mediocre. The shoes are okay. You wouldn't ever buy the clothes. Millennials have strong feelings about the
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brand. They grew up with it. They have hope for it. I have hope for it. But the reality of it with the consumer is something different. And to understand it, we should go away from soccer and into basketball, where they have one of the hottest athletes of the moment. If you look at the shoes they have, this is the shoe they have for Victor Wembenyama right now. They're simply bad. I had a moment with my son when Luka was traded to the Lakers from the Mavericks, when he was asking, does he have shoes? He was aware of the idea of the shoes and Jordan shoes. And I remember distinctly showing him the Luka shoes in all the styles and being like,
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yeah, I'm cool, bro. And I'm trying to put that in perspective of people that grew up in the era I did, where it would just be like them taking an L or doing that just seems not even comprehensible. But this is it. Look at the Jordan Luka 3. Look at this. Who is wearing this? How is this aspirational? How does one of the top athletes in one of the biggest markets get represented by Nike for something like this? And it's not just one athlete or two athletes. Everyone on the Jordan roster, everyone on the Nike roster, perhaps best exemplified by the honestly complacent trash
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of the Devin Booker shoe, trying to badly reinvent what came before it in a really unique market with a unique player who could have done so much more. One of the only players with a decent shoe in presentation, John Moran. But even then, they had to go through a sea of whack shoe after whack shoe to get to anything interesting and respectable. And to the point now, when you go on to the football cleats section of this, and you scroll through these now, there is very little here, if anything, that you'd want to wear, that you'd be excited about. And I find this interesting that this is where this brand is at. When we are in one of the most interesting times in design,
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possibly ever, where there's so much talent, there is so much high quality, and they choose again and again to put out stuff that is mediocre at best. So what happened? I'm going to talk for a bit about how jerseys began to take over culture and how that began to actually take share away from these big brands used to sell you athletics. We'll talk a bit about campaigns and relevancy in the modern era, the brands that are taking this share and the unique things that they're doing. And then go into the marketing behind the World Cup and why this is such an important and pivotal moment for both Nike
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and Adidas on the trajectories they're going, one up and one down. So the cultural cachet of sportswear is at an absolute all-time high. And the soccer jersey perhaps most exemplifies that. Brands like House of Errors that I'm wearing right now took that fandom that used to be expressed through like a Nike garment and made it simply more interesting. And that became a major trend. It's gone all the way down into brands like PacSun. And you'll see lots of brands that are actually passionate about the jersey use it pretty extensively inside what they're doing. Kid Super, another example I frequently point to,
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where the founder is passionate about soccer. And you see it again and again as a motif inside the clothes that they put out. But all of this, this embracing of this, used to be traditionally focused on these major athletic brands. But now the symbol isn't the jersey of the player itself. It's it as a fashion concept. That's an arena that Nike doesn't play in at all. And it's not like other brands haven't noticed. One of my favorite stories of the last few years is Umbrose taking a more fashion forward approach with the line they've done with Slam Jam. Right. And they came out and they launched
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it in 2025 with this chainmail jersey. Right. Which is the perfect example of the abstraction we have of these artifacts we have around sports. We want to purchase. We want to remember. We want to represent us. And what can be done with a vision around that. And when you look at these, you go, OK, this creative director working on this gets taken by Umbro, but not Nike. And you can see this brand was able to get life breathed back into it by making really interesting sportswear. And if you just go through the Slam Jam collections, there is more interesting things happening here than across the
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entire Nike site. And I say this to highlight that it is a talent war that we are in right now. We have more independent talent than ever. Better designers, more creative directors, the ability to sample and test more things, more inspiration, more people working together. But since the Virgil Abloh era, none of that has landed at Nike. And at the same time, you have the fanatics world, right? The world of cheap jerseys. My only fanatics anecdote is that's one of the most despised brands by generations. Right. You have, I remember at a Super Bowl party recently back in Feb, kids had angry fanatic stories and
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adults had angry fanatic stories. How they'd gotten a bad quality or not arrived on time or they'd been disappointed. There's been this cheapening of the official merchandise significantly by how bad of a brand that is and how much they've tarnished the fan experience that it dirties the brands in the middle and has made people go to more of these independent people that obviously care about it. Well, at the same time, we've seen the teams themselves actually flourishing by embracing design. In Italy, multiple clubs are doing just an exceptional job. The merchandise performs and is more widely known
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than the teams in their actual games. And they're putting out better stuff at better prices than a lot of the actual brands. And both of these have done an excellent job with their releases. And perhaps most interestingly, the campaign has changed. All those big ads I showed you before were done by the same ad agencies that are still working on Nike campaigns. We still see that the last bastion of the millennial, like big catchy tagline, a key moment ad. They still operate in this more antiquated way. And what's happening is you are seeing the internet build around it faster. And a great example is this young
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guy, Asher Hyde, who after Wemby's games against OKC the other day, released just mock-ups, right? It's just nano banana mock-ups of these ads are ruthlessly viral, hundreds of millions of views, where he's able to deploy a concept based on the nun iconography, the nuns that are at the sports games, at the Spurs games. But even that, just showcasing the size, showcasing him against other athletes. The creativity happens at a faster speed and done better by independents. And these brands are able to do with their own IP because they won't adapt their systems. They're locked in with these
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ad agencies that are antiquated, with these processes that are super behind. Those are the people that are desperately trying to catch up by watching the kind of videos, the stuff we have on our channel, and realizing they can't act like that. There's too much of a change. And you end up in this sea shift of brands that can act and brands that can't. But in the meantime, the campaigns are executed specifically by others. The personalities become the stars more than the brands behind them. How did we end up with a better Ja Morant ad from an AI creator, no matter how cursed you think that may be, then they got more
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interaction than anything the actual brand put out. And then we enter that relevancy moment too, with those athletes. Shohei Otani is with New Balance. Cooper Flagg is with New Balance. Anthony Edwards is with Adidas. There's more competition than ever, faster a speed to move. And we have a company with incredible IP that is behind the ball constantly. Before we dive into the state of marketing, why the World Cup is so important, and what's happening as we speak, as we think about the soccer jersey as a pop culture item. As something fashion brands interpret, something where the elements are broken down and recreated and shared, where these lookbooks are looked at
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aspirationally from these teams and these releases, where brands are even creating fictional teams, the play with materials, the things I talked about. So last year, I'd worked on some concepts around this for some brand merchandise. And I pulled together dozens of like vintage jersey designs, art direction, mood boards, and visual campaigns with football themes as part of the process, as well as a bunch of factories to make them. We ended up going with an alternative direction, this luxury collection you may have seen last summer. But I want to find a way to present this here and share a bunch of those resources. It's more than just a mood board or
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a link. So I went to Perplexity Computer and created a microsite from scratch that you can get here for free. It's a design resource, a factory resource. And so you'll see it has 38 campaigns, 100 jerseys, 16 manufacturers, mood boards, all live on this site with links you can use as a resource. If you ever wondered how it works to put something like this together, you can build that inside of Perplexity Computer. They have access to multiple different models for different functions. It can do deep research with one, it can compose copy with another, generate graphics, write, design, code, and deploy all in one interface you see here. So I gave computer the
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initial links and resources that I pulled. I asked it to pull a lot more. I could determine if I want to add or reject them. And then I asked it to build a complete browsable site with these different sections for mobile and desktop that I could present here as a design resource. In about 20 minutes, we went from concept to site. And you can see me asking it to change different specific things in here to go validate images and previews. I can just do this all inside the Perplexity Computer interface. If you've ever wanted any design inspiration around this niche now or for the future, you can check out the build in the description and you'll find the template and
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prompts I used you could use for compiling your own resource or building microsites with Perplexity Computer. All the links are in the description. I hope you find it super useful. And thank you so much to Perplexity for sponsoring this video. Before we get into this year's World Cup, I want to talk about running as an example of what's happening right now. Why this is such an important era to think about. So we have so many of these brands. If you look at like, why is Nike no longer the champion of running? Why are they not associated with running? Why have they even owned like a fraction of the
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subculture the way they used to? And look at how specific these brands have gotten, right? So you have Satisfye and Satisfye is here collabing with Adidas. You have Minted New York dropping running shoes with Saucony and incredible gear. You have District Vision and all of these are niched in, right? District Vision owns like the wellness end of it and they do it with New Balance. Satisfye has more of like the Ed Hardy affliction vibe. Granted a little higher end because they're French. Minted is fiercely independent and personality driven. Bandit owns the underdog and the concept. They launched that
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unsponsored project went directly at something that felt very Nike saying, hey, we're going to give these athletes, these underdogs a chance. Tracksmith has collegiate. The casual user, the user just wants to have a shoe that looks good on, just took all of that, especially in like the more suburban demographic. Hoka has the trails. There is no subculture that Nike is able to own and the world is splintering into these subcultures. And so every one of these categories is up for grabs. Part of when I originally started this channel, it's giving away lots of factory links and how to build brand items because the opportunity is so large because every one of
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those big conglomerates is operating behind the ball. You are able to get market share from them. And it's not just DTC anymore. It's not just getting it online. You see more and more of these people opening up stores. Tracksmith has so many stores and doing run clubs in all these regions. I was in Tokyo. I wandered by a bandit store in Tokyo. The scale that these brands are able to operate at and a certain amount of speed is just extremely encouraging. When you look at the soccer landscape, this is where Adidas' advantage shows the most clearly. Adidas owns roughly 40% of the global
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football boot market. And with their actual kit deals, their relationships run extremely deep. They basically dominate that segment. And in 2025, they announced home kits for 22 nations simultaneously. They've splintered down as well. More and more smaller collabs, more and more regional. And each one of those 22 kits that they announced had its own design background, its own lore, its own campaign. That's what it means to operate in this modern landscape if you are one of those bigger brands, is to use your scale to operate lots of smaller campaigns the way the internet works in niches, in regionality, in algorithms. For the 2026 World Cup, Adidas has 13 nations,
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including Mexico and Argentina. Nike has 12, two of them being the host countries, which is why this lines up to be one of the more competitive moments of this. And this comes at a peak moment, right? Adidas has been football-adjacent fashion culture in a much stronger way than Nike. The Samba, the Gazelle, the Copa, those are all also related to the football world. And the way that any of Nike's dominance is more SBs, basketball, their newfound growth and success is attached to a cultural memory of the game in a way Nike's never really was. And so globally, Nike's market share is set to decline,
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not a huge amount, but a minor amount. And Adidas is set to rise, a small amount as well. But this World Cup is particularly important because it is Nike's backyard, U.S. and Canada. And with them set to own the host countries, you see Adidas came in with the strongest campaign possible from the start. So before Nike was even able to announce what they're doing with their campaigns, we got Timothee Chalamet at the peak of his moments, messy, bad bunny, in a film that was, for the first time, something, you know, watched at the breakfast table with my family. Something on the par of what we saw in those Nike examples we had originally. And now whatever Nike does,
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as good as it is, and bringing out that star power, it's secondary to what they rolled out. I think it's worth talking about how this actually works. Why is this such an important moment? How brands that are both actually involved and involved on the side can like hijack these big moments like the World Cup. So FIFA does like a billion, 1.1 billion in sponsorships from this 2026 World Cup. Adidas pays for the tournament rights, Visa pays, Coca-Cola pays. Coca-Cola has been paying since 1976. So these are the official partners. Their logos appear on the broadcasts, corner flags, the match balls. They've bought the real estate around this. But that's not always the
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brand that walks away with the actual cultural resonance from the event. That just sets you up to make sure you have some guaranteed impressions. So in 2010 in South Africa, Adidas is the big FIFA sponsor, same way they are this year. And Nike is not an official sponsor. They never are. So they launched a film then with Kobe Bryant, Ronaldo, Federer. That went ultra viral, especially for that time, like 7 million views or something. And they ended up with a Nielsen tracked buzz of 30.2% of the brand conversation around the World Cup. Adidas only had 14, even though they weren't the
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official sponsor. And they did that for maybe 10, 25 million on the campaign versus the hundreds of millions Adidas spent to sponsor the whole thing. Because there is so much attention and conversation around the few monoculture moments that we have left. It's why a Super Bowl ad is still worth the money for a lot of brands. It's so hard to get that many targeted eyeballs at one time. They have the ability to potentially spur a bigger conversation. Now, this isn't always just the big brands like this, right? So in 2014 in Brazil, Beats by Dre had a moment. They weren't a
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sponsor. They're not even a sports brand. And they'd actually just been banned by FIFA. Players could not wear those headphones because Sony was the official sponsor. So Beats launched a film during the pregame. LeBron, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne. Doesn't even mention the World Cup. Gets 23 million views. And the same rating system basically shows that Beats has more of an association with the World Cup than Sony, the actual sponsor. Like, this is the virality move that we played. They also sent custom Beats in team colors to all the top squads in the tournament. And players kept wearing them
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despite the ban because they were hot. And then when Germany won the final, they gave the players 24 karat gold headphones delivered by Naomi Campbell, right? This is someone going for the jugular in a cultural moment. This is why, as we lead up to this, there's so much brand planning that goes into it. Because these official sponsorships only buy you access to the surface, right? The moment itself is just about who can direct human attention. And that's done through careful planning and thought and timing. Just like we saw with the Adidas. The Adidas fired early, knowing they could get ahead of
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the conversation, potentially be the first to dominate it. Anything Nike does now is in response to Adidas. Now, maybe they can blow it out of the water, but because it came out so strong, anything similar is another bunch of star power looks like a copy. They're preemptively getting ahead, knowing their competitor is down bad. Because guess what? Judging by Nike's recent track record, they probably don't have anything sick lined up. It's probably okay. And so the playbook for this, if you're actually looking at implementing this as a brand, because this goes to any event, goes to any new thing. If you want to think about how do you hijack something, the Boston Marathon,
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if you're a running company, if you see Bandit do this, a grip, CrossFit games, anything, three things. It's about relationships with the principles, not just sponsoring the events, about who is in there that you are able to work with to get attention, the actual players, the actual competitors, the actual people involved with the event. Because working with them outside of it can be just as impactful and likely cheaper. And then it's about having territory that the other people can't claim. Beats isn't competing for the ad that's on during the actual World Cup. They're competing for the tunnel or what people are wearing there. And then you want to create
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something that's worth sharing on its own terms, right? This Timothee Chalamet Adidas ad isn't just exciting because it's the World Cup. Again, it doesn't even mention the World Cup. It's interesting on its own. It's a short film. It's funny. It's creative. It has a lot of star power. Whether or not it's attached to the World Cup, it's worth sharing. And that's the mistake of just putting all the same creative or launching another ad or focusing direct on this is there's bigger ramifications now in terms of what virality can make. And right now in 2026, brands are expecting to double the
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social engagement in 2022. We're in a different world now. It's far more social, far more shareable. The ability to say, we're going to put out a campaign. We're going to get the conversation going. We're going to seed it with clippers. We're going to get into a response. We're going to know that there's an algorithm building around it and act on it is crucial. You may have seen a video I put out a while back about Coachella. Why do so many brands spend so much money on Coachella? Because there's a Coachella algorithm. You consume some content about Coachella, just like the Olympics.
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And I put out videos around this. They did great. I had a video about Olympics. I had a video about Coachella. Because so many people are watching and viewing that content, whether it's a hate watch or a like watch, they show them more and more of it. The algorithms know this. They respond to it. They put it inside your feed and they test it to a lot more people. This happens at every big event. And this becomes an opportunity to hijack that, to sponsor a couple people to go, to release a jersey, to do X or Y collection related to it, to basically catch the tail of that algorithm, to get more views than you
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normally would. This is such an outsized opportunity for small brands who understand social media. I absolutely have to call it out. It's the same exact thing for creators as well. And all this goes back to big agencies aren't able to understand it and leverage it, although they are getting better. Big brands have a hard time moving into this. And it is the time with the smaller people who can come around and move against the culture in different ways. And so I'm going to end with, what would I think Nike had to do to get back on track? So the first thing I think would be, would be retire the sneakers app.
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Sneaker culture, hype beast culture is probably the biggest negative implication and association with Nike now. So many people have used the sneakers app and just never gotten the stuff they actually want. So the consumer now has a negative association with one of those top apps. Got to crush that. That has to go. And then when they do release it, do things like the limited, it has to just have more production. It doesn't have to be unlimited. But if someone wants something, you have to be able to let them get it. You will not be able to get the kids excited. You're not be able to get the collaboration
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scale, even know what works and what the depth is without more availability. You have to be anti-reseller culture. There are no people besides maybe crypto people who are looked down upon more than sneaker reseller, sneaker flipper. You have to remove that association. You have to actively work against that as that brand. You need to position that that is something they are never going to be able to support again. You should be able to get whatever you want from the brand at its own price, resets with this new population who have such a negative association with these brand experiences.
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And with that comes an exiting of the C-suite, right? No one now responsible for marketing, for design, or for product. And thus, no one in the operations around that should be allowed to stay there. It needs to be a complete house clean. Same thing with the agencies. Every old agency has to go. None of them operate inside this world that we're in now. And does that mean more coordination, more campaigns, more failures, whatever? Yes, but there's no way you can keep winning with the same agency that you had 25 years ago. They do not have the juice to function in the modern era. I know. I go to these. I do these workshops at these major brands, at Fortune 500s, inside the
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household names. We talk about their marketing. We go through it. They know who they have, can't respond. They know they're behind. Most people just don't do anything about it. But with a brand where that lifestyle and the marketing is everything, you have to do something about it. Then fanatical focus on new silhouettes and actually incubating design talent that stays with the brand, actually documents what's happening and shares it. It cannot be the clothes vault. It has to be a story that Nike is telling with its designers, with its athletes, all in one amazing internet canvas that could be better
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entertainment than any other brand has. Nothing to care far more for the women's market beyond a few collabs and skims, a handful of athletes. It feels like an afterthought and a design afterthought, and it's lost its purchase power with that demographic. But it's a complicated market there now with a lot of movement between those brands, the Lulus, the Allos, etc., that potentially with some focus could get brought back. And lastly, to bring voices to social media. They need not just their Marcus Millioni, dozens of them. Unique people with perspectives inside the company are building
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their own brands or building subsections there. They're able to actually share with passion that story at a greater level. And frankly, I don't think they'll be able to do it. I think we'll see one of the great American brands get continually hacked and chipped away at into obscurity. It will remember what it was, and it will be more Kmart and TJ Maxx than anything else. And I hope that I'm wrong, but there's nothing that I've seen that was suggestible go a different way. If you're passionate about these kinds of topics, doing another creative direction webinar coming up here in a week or two, I will link down here where we run them basically like a community call where
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I talk a little bit and do a training. Then we all go through questions and Q&A and actually just workshop the things that are going on. So if you want to connect with other people that you're excited about this with and just get deeper into these topics and actually do some workshopping and talk about it, we'd love to have you then as well. We'll be documenting a lot more marketing around what actually happens during the World Cup. So you can find that on short form. I appreciate y'all so much for watching.