It was Nike’s first-ever Russian winter campaign. The Sochi Winter Olympics was just round the corner. A well-loved brand in the warmer months, our insight was: To win in Russia, you need to win in winter. Just as Russian kids subvert their world in winter – sculpting and adapting their winter environment to fit their sporting life – we would do the same. Subversion was our strategy. By celebrating winter sports and everyday athletes, we would turn our brand advocates into athletes, ask them to capture their extreme sports moments on camera, share them on Nike’s HUB, and let peers be the judge: Is it good enough to be ‘PlayRussian’?

An epic film featuring national heroes sparked the PlayRussian campaign. Eight weeks of extreme winter games then began: extreme swimming, snowboarding, ice parties – you name it. Nike created the #playrussian hashtag so Russia’s street athletes could upload their crazy sports moments and let peers vote on whether they believed it was worthy of #playrussian. The winner was voted most ‘abnormal’ athlete in Russia. To build participation through subversion, we interrupted ‘The Simpsons’ on TV with our own 60” edit of the theme tune. Nike convinced TV station ‘Rain TV’ to change its name to ‘Snow TV’ and gained a product placement when the channel changed the national hockey team kit live on TV. We changed the appearance and logo on many homepages of leading desktop and mobile sites so they emulated the #playrussian style. We even featured the campaign theme tune in the main video slot for cinema website IVI.ru.

We inspired 17 million Russians with PlayRussian. There were over 2 million views on YouTube in just the first 48 hours. Within six days, Twitter and Instagram users adopted the #playrussian hashtag and 1,600 people posted using it. Some posts received more than 3,400 Likes. In the first 30 days, over 380,000 people visited Nike’s HUB with 12,000 PlayRussian moments submitted and 500 featured on the HUB, receiving over 245,000 votes. Product specific searches increased over by 200% during the campaign.