| Title | PRO-GENIUS |
| Brand | NIKE FOOTBALL |
| Product/Service | NIKE FOOTBALL |
| Category |
B04. Mobile Games |
|
Entrant
|
AKQA London, UNITED KINGDOM
|
|
Idea Creation
|
AKQA London, UNITED KINGDOM
|
Credits
| 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
Over the course of five months we developed the digital training tools alongside launch content. Each tool consisted of either an interactive mobile game or audio guide paired with an introductory video explaining the concept and benefit. All games lived within the Mental Training section of the Nike Football App. The tools were designed and built by our internal development team in partnership with Nike’s digital team.
To launch, we leveraged the social power of Nike’s elite footballers to reach over 500 million followers. Launch was timed alongside the summer’s biggest football events, UEFA European Championship and Copa America. To capture the huge football seeking audience, we placed Pro Genius films and stills on Nike.com, Nike social channels, Nike retail locations and athlete social channels.
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.
The target audience are 14-20-year-old footballers around the world and they will do everything they can to make the grade as a footballer. They demand to know and practice the same training techniques as their idols. They are well versed in technical and physical training, but they knew very little about mental training, and how for their idols it’s a fundamental part of their regime.
Nike have years of consumer research we were able to pull from to build the foundation for this thinking. We visited local pitches and spoke with our target audience about their familiarity to the mental side of football.
We then spoke with leaders in sports mental training to gather applications of training techniques and to identify what practices would resonate with our target audience. Access to pro clubs through Nike allowed us to reach elite level coaching and ascertain the foundations of tools we developed.