A Loveletter to NYC, Written on its Streets
2008 / Wieden + Kennedy
A lotta firsts. Two years before Instagram even existed, “The Baseball State of Mind” Campaign was one of the first to use amateur photography sourced from a social platform (flickr). One of the first (and only) OOH campaigns to require complex, sequential media buying in multiple spaces. The first project I ever beat other creatives out for. My first big project PERIOD.
Yankee stadium was in its last year. Fittingly, it would host the All-Star Game one last time, and in that game, host many of its sons from the Yankees and the Mets. It was a veritable advertising subway series for Nike, whose roster included most of the local greats: A-Rod, Mariano Rivera, David Wright, José Reyes, Jorge Posada. It was THE moment to honor NYC Baseball.
Baseball isn't my sport, but I am a certified card-carrying New Yorker and I love the shit out of this town. I was just starting my career, and this was the shot I was looking for. Me and the other greenest kid in the agency threw everything we had at it and what we made was a love letter to NY.
We strung together a campaign of entirely found images, including found photos from Flickr.
At the time, no one had even conceived of UGC or social media influencers. We just pulled great local photos from people who shot them for the love—not the likes.
We took the roots of baseball and the nature of the city and we made something that people cared about. It was one of the few campaigns I’ve had the pleasure of seeing real people react to. It was everywhere—physically. The papers, the subway, wildpostings, even Nike's 34th st. billboard.
I'll always remember this campaign fondly. My partner and I shouldn't have gotten it, but we did, and we took it someplace. When I rode the subways, I saw people looking them over. To New York baseball fans they weren't just ads, and for a kid from Brooklyn, even just getting the opportunity to do that project made me feel like the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
And…for a kid who dabbled in graffiti, it was a weirdly satisfying feeling to see your work plastered all over the city.
Nike NY's Baseball State of Mind was an Outdoor Advertising Association of America Merit Awards Finalist.
If you liked this work,
you might also like the people who worked on it.
Luke Behrends, Copywriting
Ricardo Viramontes, Logo Design, general mentorship
Todd Waterbury & Kevin Proudfoot, Executive Creative Direction, Creative Direction, and a whole lotta handholding on my first big project
And you might like
these projects:
Attack
A whole buttload of stuff I did with a different team at Wieden, which in many was also very culturally-specific.
Jordan zipcodes
Another culturally-specific sports campaign that I did around the same time with a lot of the same people.
Miracle Stain
A Super Bowl spot I did with Luke years later at a way different agency.