During research, we found that the pace at which young Londoners lived and consumed media was unparalleled. The myth of ‘short attention spans’ not only underestimates them, it misleads clients and creative marketing teams. This is a generation who are masterful curators of content. They consume long-form media too, but our job is to give them a compelling reason to consume it.

To engage this audience, we needed exciting content presented in a way that made an authentic connection with young Londoners’ lives. We wanted to give them stories that were relevant to their lives, their local neighbourhood within the city and — given how fast-moving they were — their journey through London.

And we needed to deliver that content in a channel that would grab their attention and in a moment that mattered to them. This made social crucial to the campaign.

London-only media ran during February half-term (identified as a moment that mattered) on TV, Snapchat, Instagram, Xbox, YouTube, native digital, mobile and cinema (the 180-second ‘silver spot’ before Black Panther, the highest-grossing February film in history).

At the heart of the campaign were short video stories about real young Londoners. These worked both as a series and in isolation. We tailored the first story someone saw, and the platform it launched on, to the user’s geolocation. This first instalment was designed to grab attention and encourage click-through. But users were free to choose when to view the next instalment.

With 29 million completed views, many did choose to ‘tap to advance’. We deepened our understanding of the campaign, providing a suite of social assets to help supercharge engagement. These included never-before-seen sticker-packs on Snapchat, Nike London Avatars in Xbox and endorsements from icons such as Skepta and Mo Farah.

The campaign’s metrics surpassed client and agency expectations. Swipe rates on Snapchat were two times higher than the benchmark. On Instagram, the swipe rate was ten times the benchmark. On YouTube, those viewing the full 3 mins were almost 10% more likely to consider purchasing Nike. Remember the problem of wavering brand affinity? The true success of this campaign was its influence on addressing exactly that.

Brand affinity increased (“Nike understands the community I live in” increased by 7%. The percentage saying, “Nike understands people like me”, increased by 6%.) Brand awareness increased by 7% and brand preference by 3%. In some London boroughs, there was more than a 200% increase in the volume of brand mentions. After a dynamic 2-week campaign, young Londoners could ‘see, touch and feel’ the brand once more.

Our targets — 16-to-24-year-old Londoners — were constantly moving through London, consuming social, content as they went. Their experience was tightly bound to London geography. We decided to use these factors to micro-target on social. Informed by our insight of ‘pace’, the strategy ‘tap to advance’ was born.

We’d place creative in real-world and social environments favoured by the audience. They could choose how fast to progress through the story, moving from one platform to the next. At each point, content served would depend on a range of cues, including engagement rates, preferences, geolocation and retargeting. No two user journeys would be identical.

We selected social platforms based on relevance rather than mass scale and we also used research-based insights to recruit influencers who would resonate with young Londoners. To truly work, this campaign had to let our audience lead, at their pace and not ask them to follow.

Nike is the top-selling sportswear brands among young Londoners. But long-term health of brand relies on retaining the loyalty of its young customer demographic. Research revealed that high-profile marketing campaigns built around athletes were not enough to secure this. "Nike will always be big,” said a kid who attended a focus group, “but it’s so big, we can't see, touch or feel the brand anymore”.

Our job was to reconnect Nike with 16-24-year-old Londoners. To do that, we needed to dispense with all the clichés and stereotypes about ‘Generation Z’. It was clear to us that this dynamic, diverse and sophisticated demographic was too often misunderstood. Too many middle-age marketers were still struggling to understand millennials, the generation before the one we needed to target. To reconnect Nike with its fans, we needed to really get under the skin of Gen-Z Londoners.