Nike’s 50th-anniversary film resurrects legendary hype man Mars Blackmon (played by Spike Lee, who also directed the spot) to play a game of chess with a Gen-Z spark plug called Zimmie. As Mars recalls the great Nike athletes from the last 50 years (MJ, Bo Jackson, Mia Hamm and more) saying he's "seen it all before," Zimmie challenges him by arguing the athletes of the future are setting a new pace for sport, and Mars “ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Our task was to extend this idea on social media to drive participation in the campaign, focusing on TikTok. Above all else, Nike wanted to instigate movement, so working in non-traditional ways to invite Gen Z to move with Nike, in their own way, is exactly what we aimed for.

In the 50th-anniversary film, Zimmie introduces Mars Blackmon to a new generation of Nike athletes –– Jah Morant, Naomi Osaka, Kylian Mbappé, Sabrina Ionescu, among many others –– before concluding with the line, “You think you’ve seen everything? You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

The creative idea was to have Zimmie repeat this exact same line before asking her new audience on TikTok to back her up. All they had to do was to use the same sound (composed by Chong the Nomad) as they show us what the next generation of athletes might look like.

Drafting off of the Mars and Zimmie anthem film, we knew we had to instigate movement with Gen Z, and there's no better place to do it than TikTok. With Zimmie as the hype person for the next 50 years of Nike, we set out to find a talented musician who could develop a custom sound for Nike to draw people in to participate. Chong the Nomad was the perfect partner for this, and we defined the "anatomy of a TikTok sound" as the foundation for her composition. All of this, combined with a strong CTA was the perfect recipe for getting Gen Z to define the future of sport (and reaching the top of the trending charts).

The “Seen It All TikTok” went live in concurrence with the 50th Anniversary Spike Lee film. It encouraged the next generation of athletes to "Show Us What You Got" by submitting their own videos using the custom Chong the Nomad sound created for Nike. User-generated videos started flooding in, and over the next 10 days, we posted some of the best and craziest UGC to Nike's TikTok page to feature the next generations' vision for the future of sport.

No. 1 Trending TikTok Song

61.6MM Launch Video Views

67.5K TikToks made

322MM hashtag views (#Nike50th)

Countless submissions (ok, we counted them) were received, showing feats of sport as varied and as colorful as TikTok's audience. Chong the Nomad’s sound even became the No. 1 trending song on TikTok, beating Post Malone and The xx the week of launch. It also jumped platforms to show up on @Sportscenter’s Instagram Reels page. Using a remix-driven platform like TikTok allowed Nike’s message, and the work, to spread into countless subcultures, inviting audiences to show the future of sport in their own unique way.

In summary, we introduced the apparel company to a whole new audience on TikTok (even breaking Nike’s own app records) pulling together to prove that Zimmie was right when she said that, when it comes to progression in sport, the world “ain’t seen nothing yet.”