For many years, Nike Japan had seen a steady drop off of teens (aged 15-18) engaging with sport in Japan. The teens in this age group deal with intense pressures: personal, academic, and beyond. But, upon speaking with youth in Japan, academic pressure was identified as the key culprit in creating this cycle of never-ending stress. Our brief set out to connect with this audience in a way that could help them discover the power of sport to overcome this mental stress during one of the most challenging times in their lives. We wanted to get the youth in Japan to move their bodies again as a gateway back to sport*.

Jukus are culturally relevant in Japan because they reflect the country's strong emphasis on education and academic achievement. As a result, many families view jukus as a way to provide their children with additional academic support and help them succeed in a highly competitive education system.

By attending a juku, students can demonstrate their dedication to their studies and their commitment to achieving their goals, which is highly valued in Japanese society. However, Juku is also notorious for promoting excessive studying, leading to burnout, and lack of social interaction. Hence it’s an incredible culturally relevant idea to bring a healthy version to Juku to life with sport at the center.

it is estimated that approximately 60% of elementary school students and 80% of junior high school students attend juku in some form. This means that millions of children attend juku every day, either after regular school hours or on weekends. Students attending juku often have to study for long hours, sometimes up to 10-12 hours a day, which can be physically and mentally exhausting. Kids have limited free time to pursue hobbies, spend time with family and friends, or engage in physical activity: a huge reason why they stop doing sports. We discovered many studies show that even short exercises positively affect your academic performance. For example, 12 minutes of exercise can improve concentration and reading ability for an hour. Ten minutes can improve test scores by 5.5%. So the strategy was, let’s help students reduce stress through sport instead of more cramming.

The Nike Juku workout program was announced with a music video to reach students on social media, where they mostly spend their study break time. The film shows kids moving their bodies and refreshing their brains thanks to the catchy lyrics of international stars Atarashii Gakko! exclusive song.

The girl band, incredibly famous thanks to their crazy choreographies, storms into the classrooms full of bored students accompanied by a crew of famous Nike athletes & artists, getting everyone moving thanks to short study breaks that were later available online. These included the comedian Yuriyan teaching a massage to soothe hands tired from taking notes, stress-easing meditation by skateboarding gold medalist Yuto Horigome, and a Riehata butt-dancing choreo.

The song, performed in concerts and TV shows, went viral and got to students thanks to strategically placed Tik Tok videos & filters, and a national pilot program available for teachers in Japan.

The campaign page was the highest trafficked page on nike.com during the campaign period. The Nike Japan YouTube channel, which hosts the program content, gained +2.1K new subscribers with 14M total views within only one month, and 62M media impressions within the first week alone. NIKE received x2 more coverage for this project versus other non-product launches with 59 pieces of coverage and roughly 4.6M views. With the success and positive reactions from the the youth in Japan, NIKE extended the program into a second phase, evolving the campaign into IRL spaces for students to experience first-hand (Nike Juku at takeover of karaoke box’s) which received overwhelmingly positive feedback. If that weren’t enough, Nike Juku has since been adopted as a pilot program to directly learn from students engaging with Nike Juku content across hundreds of schools in Japan. Simply put, Nike Juku got more students moving.