PRO-GENIUS

TitlePRO-GENIUS
BrandNIKE FOOTBALL
Product/ServiceNIKE FOOTBALL
Category A02. Creative Innovation
Entrant AKQA London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation AKQA London, UNITED KINGDOM
Credits
Name Company Position
Toby Burnett AKQA Creative Director
Adrian Stannard AKQA Associate Creative Director
Pedro Vilas Boas AKQA Design Director
Lionel Agbadou AKQA Senior Designer
John Leigh AKQA Senior Designer
Rob James AKQA Copywriter
Antonin Collard AKQA Senior Designer
Alex Aidan AKQA Senior Account Director
Mike Sinnerton AKQA Account Director
Dan Brown AKQA Senior Project Manager
Sam Rushworth AKQA Editor
Ben Gonshaw AKQA Game Designer
Joe Robinson AKQA Senior User Experience Architect
Simon Brunton AKQA Group Technical Director
Gabriel Novoa AKQA Technical Delivery Manager
Stephen Smith AKQA Technical Delivery Manager
Alex Falcoeiras AKQA Principal Web Developer
Emile Swain AKQA Creative Development Director
Paddy Keane AKQA Associate Creative Development Director
Karen Chui AKQA Senior Web Developer
Stuart Robinson AKQA Senior Web Developer
Serhii Kocherev AKQA Senior Web Developer
Dmytro Yastrebov AKQA Senior Web Developer
Mihnea Belcin AKQA Senior Web Developer
Kathryn Webb AKQA Senior Web Developer
Robert Gilks AKQA Senior Software Engineer
Veronica Garcia AKQA Software Engineer
Sanjay Hari AKQA Quality Assurance Manager
Jeff Brutus AKQA Quality Assurance Analyst 

The Campaign

The world’s first mental training service for footballers. Nike Football Pro Genius is a suite of football-specific brain training tools and techniques.  It replicates the kinds of mental training elite footballers use, optimizes them for mobile and makes them available to the masses.   Working with world class footballers and leading sports psychologists, six interactive tools were developed to train the neurological and psychological parts of the brain.   The world’s biggest players promoted the service to their collective 500m+ social media followers. Each athlete released bespoke AV and still assets showing them training mentally ahead of and during Euro 2016 and COPA America.

Creative Execution

The Nike Pro Genius tools live exclusively in the Nike Football app within the app’s training curriculum. Sitting under the ‘Mental Training’ category, the tools have individual app cards explaining the benefit and science through a football lens. The three interactive tools are web app based and launch within the Nike app, creating a seamless transition. These tools feel game-like with their interaction and are based on high end set-ups used by sports scientists in the professional sports field. All three tools measure reaction time and correct decisions, and deliver a score that is tagged to your Nike profile and saved. This allows users to see improvement over time and unlock new levels in the games. The audio tools all have a video intro and audio only components that allow users to practice the mental coaching methods whenever they like. The length and script for each audio tool was created by our sports scientist consultants along with the intro films. All 6 tools have specific benefits in regards to football training and have prescribed times for play and number of repetitions the user should engage in. These mental training tools are all live currently in the Nike Football App.

The Pro Genius tools are available exclusively in the Nike Football app which is available in over 50 countries and in 19 languages. On launch day we racked up over 15 million views on all Nike channels, driving over 120K downloads of the app. Within the first week, 570K training sessions had been logged resulting in over 10K hours of time spent in app. The Pro Genius campaign stands as Nike Football’s most successful digital campaign in terms of downloads of the native app and membership registrants in launch week. Social reaction was overwhelmingly positive as users remarked they had never seen anything like Pro Genius. We successfully exposed our target audience to a new facet of football training – the mental side of the game. These tools mark Nike’s first foray into the growing mental training market and we are already working on future applications alongside Nike’s innovation network.

Nike Football Pro Genius is the world’s first mental training service for footballers, bringing brain training to the masses. Pro Genius offers a suite of football-specific mental training tools and techniques available on mobile app. It replicates the kinds of training elite footballers use, optimized for mobile and unlocked for young footballers globally. ProGenius offers a combination of tactile and audio based tools that range from reaction testing, pattern recognition to visualization and positive self talk. Lessons and tools pro footballers in elite clubs are exposed to are delivered to young athletes’ mobile phones for an engaging and rewarding experience.