Olympics — Emily Jensen

Nike Olympic Reactives

Narrative Direction + Writing

We traveled to Paris during the Olympic Games to co-lead storytelling for Nike athlete victories, delivering a global series of social and digital OOH placements.

How do you bring depth and dimension to the idea of the winning mindset?

Listen to the athlete.

Nike’s POV is that winning is a state of mind – but that looks different for everyone. From the scrappy optimism of Sifan Hassan to the competitive fire of Sha’carri Richardson to the fearless humility of Yuto Horigome, our approach to storytelling during the Games had to make room for every voice.

Guiding a global team

Working closely with my incredible fellow narrative director Eric Montgomery and our fearless leader Justin Abbott, we developed a storytelling playbook at the Global level to set the standard for all Nike geos – including Asia Pacific & Latin America, Greater China, Europe, the Middle East & Africa, and North America. Each geo assembled brilliant teams to lead the creative for athletes hailing from their regions. Our role was to unify this global effort under a singular vision.

Narrative pillars

Our goal was to inspire a new generation of Olympics fans with a digital and OOH ecosystem of hype for our athletes.

Athlete insights

We developed a template for teams to capture insights for quick reference – from past medal counts to key quotes.

Tone of voice

Nike’s voice is always bold, confident, and rebellious – but it was amped up for the world’s biggest stage.

Writing guidelines

Because every headline would be written from the athlete’s POV, we defined a high-level sandbox to ensure consistency.

Social best practices

Integrating learnings from past Reactives work, we provided guidelines to optimize each digital placement.

IOC & accessibility

The International Olympic Committee had particularly strict rules for Nike’s creative placements due to a pilot partnership.

Stay ready

The Global team alone was tracking 60+ Olympic and Paralympic athletes across their events over five weeks of Games. We pre-wrote headlines for multiple scenarios – from consecutive gold medals to broken records – and took each set through a review process with our internal Nike stakeholders and the athletes themselves to build alignment around each narrative ahead of the games.

We were lucky to have exceptional writer Kennedy Rasberry join our team for the pre-writing phase at WHQ and then on the ground in Paris. Our team’s process was highly collaborative and iterative, building headlines from athletes’ direct quotes and key insights to ensure they felt authentic to their voice and story.

We were as prepared as possible, but we knew we needed to expect the unexpected – this was just the warmup.

Bienvenue à Paris

Our team spent three weeks on the ground in Paris to follow the games from the command center, where all of our geos came together for late nights, early mornings, and too many croissants. It was an incredible opportunity to work closely with our senior leadership to write and design in real time. From last-minute curveballs to stunning upsets to history-defining victories, we were there to celebrate it all.

Shoutout to all the geos for their incredible work. Below are a range of headlines that came from Nike teams around the world. Grateful to have been part of this global crew.