Make It Count
Nike handed Casey Neistat a budget to make a FuelBand commercial. He spent it all flying around the world with a friend for ten days and turned in the receipts as the ad. A perfect early-YouTube-era pivot from polish to authenticity.
The story
Nike gave filmmaker Casey Neistat a brief and a budget to make a commercial for the new FuelBand fitness tracker. Neistat decided the brief — "make it count" — would be more honestly told by actually doing it. He and his friend Max Joseph spent the entire production budget on plane tickets and flew around the world: Paris, Cairo, Bangkok, Rome, Cape Town, ten days, no script. The ad is a 3-minute travelogue with a single line of text on screen at the end: "We were going to make a movie about what it means to Make It Count. Instead, we just went and made it count." Released directly to YouTube in 2012, it pulled 26 million views and became the moment marketers realised an authentic vlog could out-perform a glossy TV spot.
Why it worked
The execution literally embodied the tagline. There was nothing to argue with.
Takeaway for marketers
When a brand promise is hard to fake, the most expensive thing you can do is fake it.