Nike Turns London Into a Game Board to Get People Running

With the help of an advertising firm, Nike transformed the city of London into a game board for a two-week competition called the GRID. London was divided into zones. Runners competed by starting at a phone box, dialing a number, entering a unique ID, and then following the instructions to run to other phone boxes. The organizers used data from the calls (the iPod Nike+ system was not a part of the game) to create and track different kinds of competitions (e.g. men vs. women), posting the results online.

It was Nike’s desire to promote more running — in part to drive sales. What’s remarkable is that an advertising agency chose a form of play over an actual advertising campaign to achieve Nike’s goal.

Nike Turns London Into a Game Board to Get People Running:

Douglas goes on to say, “We decided the best strategic option to deliver this would be to augment the running experience; creating a layer of experience on top of the run that aimed to alter how the activity would be interacted with.” Hence the game. The current competition started last Friday and runs (no pun intended) for 15 days. Players, who can compete individually or in teams, get points, badges, and prizes for speed, routes, and “various unlockables,” Douglas writes, “that become apparent as the game unfolds.” As of this writing, the game had 2,834 players and 323 teams.

“GRID is part of a growing category of ideas that sits within, as Tom Coates of Yahoo! describes, the ‘real world web,’” Douglas writes, “connected things that blur the physical and virtual spaces — things that thrive primarily because they excite us as humans, rather than being a vehicle for demonstrating technical capability.”

I agree with Douglas. There are few things that excite us as much and as uniquely as does play. How many advertising campaigns are as enthralling as two weeks of the GRID? Further, I predict we’ll see a growing trend of cities reinvented as playgrounds for adults — with technology intimately linked to those transformations (more & more).

(via Matt Anderson)