Nike - Winning Isn't For Everyone

For summer 2024, Nike unveiled its newest campaign, “Winning Isn’t for Everyone”, celebrating victory and featuring a collective of the world’s greatest athletes. The campaign included a film narrated by Willem Dafoe and spotlighted athletes such as LeBron James, Serena Williams, and Giannis Antetokounmpo. A second installment, “Winning Is Winning”, followed, narrated by Nike athlete Bebe Vio and featuring Paralympic athletes.

As part of the campaign, Monks collaborated with Nike Global to create an interactive homepage overlay and an in-app experience for Nike.com and the Nike App. These featured a mosaic grid of athletes competing in the 2024 Olympics, allowing users to explore winning statements, quotes, imagery, and videos for select athletes.

The experience was built using the NextJS framework, enabling a statically generated frontend architecture that optimized performance and scalability. GraphQL APIs were used during the CI/CD pipeline to fetch content dynamically from DatoCMS at build time, ensuring all data, including athlete profiles and media, was up-to-date and accurate. By leveraging serverless infrastructure, the solution minimized server reliance, using AWS S3 for static object storage and caching the full experience in Nike’s Akamai CDN.

The use of Nike’s Akamai CDN was instrumental in multiple ways:

• It allowed the experience to use the nike.com domain, seamlessly integrating it into the Nike ecosystem.
• It significantly reduced costs for Nike, with CDN-based hosting saving over $80,000 in expenses.
• By caching the static experience in the CDN layer, the platform achieved faster global load times, improving user experience, reducing bounce rates, and increasing conversions.

AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy services powered the CI/CD pipeline, enabling efficient rebuilds of the entire experience upon code or content updates. This included generating localized versions for over 70 countries and languages, ensuring a tailored experience for Nike’s global audience.

As the Global Technical Director at Monks, I worked closely with Nike Global’s technology, product, and marketing teams to deliver this high-visibility campaign. My role included driving cost-effective solutions, optimizing infrastructure, and collaborating with Nike Global’s technology & security teams to deliver a world-class experience. This campaign was widely praised by Nike’s senior leadership for its innovative execution and seamless integration.