Nike just went all in on the World Cup.
Six minutes of film. More than thirty celebrities. Ronaldo, Mbappé, Haaland, Kim Kardashian, LeBron, Channing Tatum, all sharing the same fake movie set. Trade press mostly loved it. Craft, ambition, easter eggs everywhere.
I watched the full film, not just the 30 to 60 second cuts running on TV. Those short clips are where most people are actually meeting this campaign, and out of context they land confusing. The full version gives you more to work with. But I played this game at an All American level and have loved it my whole life, and even with the full context, the film runs long and falls flat. Good, not great. That gap between the craft everyone is praising and how it actually feels to watch is the real story here.
Look past the reviews and the bigger picture is simple. This is not a brand flexing creative muscle. This is a company that cannot afford to miss, betting enormous money and creative capital to manufacture the cultural relevance it used to generate on its own.
The Jordan brand just dropped 16% in a year. Nike’s stock is down from $170 in 2021 to $46 now. When a company that size builds a six minute film with thirty stars and calls it a universe, that is not confidence talking. That is a company trying to buy back something it lost.
To me, that is exactly why it eventually reads as hollow and confusing, cut down for TV or not. Not because the film is poorly made. Because the risk shows through. When you go all in like that, the audience can feel it, the same way you can feel it across a poker table when someone pushes every chip in. Confidence does not need thirty celebrities to prove itself. Only urgency does.
I see the same pattern in deathcare. If you are a funeral home still relying on old channels, you are facing a smaller version of Nike’s problem. Even the stuff that is working right now, like seminars, is showing real signs of decay around the edges. The market never holds still, and you cannot get comfortable. If your preneed program has been stuck in the same mode for a decade, or even the last few years, that is worth a hard look. The longer you wait to evolve, the bigger the bet you eventually have to make to catch back up, and big bets read as desperation, not strength.
I watched a version of this play out early in my career. I worked for a technology company in this space that had real marketing instincts, before private equity took it over. I am not ready to name the company yet, but what replaced those instincts was a team more interested in looking clever than being useful, and a lot more interested in the balance sheet than the actual problems customers had. Same pattern as Nike, just smaller stakes. Substance gets traded for style, and eventually the audience feels it even when they cannot name it.
Marketing does not fail because a brand stops trying. It fails when a brand starts performing instead of building.
This is good news for funeral homes, because the good ones are already built on authenticity, connection, relationships, and trust. Those things do not go out of style, and they do not require a Hollywood budget to prove themselves. The work is making sure your market keeps receiving that message, which means steadily innovating your channels and your strategy long before you are ever forced into an all in bet just to stay in the game.
