Inside Nike’s ‘Rip the Script’ World Cup campaign

The World Cup wrapped last Sunday, with Spain beating Argentina in a nailbiter of a final that scored 62.8 million viewers in the US.

For some soccer fans, the final whistle marked the end of a whirlwind few weeks. For Nike, the tournament was just the beginning.

“The actual, most exciting challenge starts today,” Camilo Andrade, global VP and GM football/soccer at Nike, told Marketing Brew the week after the tournament. “It’s the post-tournament excitement. All the billions of people that are now inspired, that are excited, that actually want to play. Our job is to actually give them the tools to play.”

Funneling the residual excitement from the World Cup into continued fandom for the game—and, of course, the brand—is what the team plans to do, Andrade said, noting that the company has already begun preparing for the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2027, the Olympics, Euro 2028, and Copa América. (It’s not the only brand to do so: MLS, the men’s stateside soccer league, is in the midst of a major marketing push to bring fans into the fold.)

Throughout the tournament, though, Nike’s marketing, helmed by its six-minute hero film, “Rip the Script,” garnered 3 billion total views, according to the company. More than 1.2 billion of those views came from Nike-owned channels; 1.6 billion views were generated through creator content; and 400 million views came from athlete and creative partners. The company got that attention through a “significant” media investment, per Andrade (although he declined to share a specific figure), as well as a Nike “ecosystem” built around the World Cup.

That meant that Nike’s football marketing team not only began with its hero film, in which more than 30 athletes and actors including star players like Kylian Mbappé, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Erling Haaland skillfully dribble the ball through various TV and film sets, but also included a plan to support other “on-ramps” through athletes and creators that gave other audiences ways into Nike’s World Cup marketing narrative.

Nike’s “Rip the Script” film, created by longtime agency partner Wieden+Kennedy, is a love letter to soccer—and also serves as a nod to how overly planned marketing campaigns can hamper creativity. The ad offers a lens through which marketers might think about breaking down some of the planning on set, allowing for improv from athletes and creatives to shine through.

“We always say at Nike that we listen to the voice of the athlete, and all the greatest stories, advertising ideas at Nike have come from that,” Andrade said. “This film, first and foremost, was a great celebration of the football that we believe in, creative football, that instinctive football, and so part of our job was to let the athletes just have fun on the set and just do what they normally do on the pitch.”

With that said, the effort was certainly well planned, and took a great deal of effort on the brand and agency’s part to coordinate the athletes and celebrities who participated in the shoot.

“I think it was around 42 days on the road,” Andrade said. “Multiple locations, multiple sets, because first and foremost, we want to make sure that it’s comfortable for the athletes. We shot athletes even as they were competing in the highest stakes of the [UEFA] Champions League. So multiple cities, multiple sets, multiple locations, multiple cameras, multiple crews. It was definitely one of the most ambitious projects that we’ve had.”