This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News Brands & Merch
Nike scrapped FKA Twigs directed ad that “pushed the boundaries of marketing”
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 1 May 2018
Nike has scrapped an advert created by FKA Twigs, despite it “costing [the company] millions of dollars” to make, seemingly because the finished film was just too weird. That’s the sort of artistic freedom you get when you’re profiting from all those over-priced trainers.
The video was intended to accompany the launch of Nike’s new VaporWave shoe. According to a new report by the New York Times, what FKA Twigs turned in “featured few shots of the shoes and instead had a woman twirling on what looked like a stripper pole and male athletes in sports bras striking odd poses”.
Says Nike spokesperson KeJaun Wilkins: “We have a history of pushing the boundaries in marketing, just as we do in product development. We create a lot of material that is not deployed in the marketplace”.
If you want an idea of quite how far the musician might have had to go in order to make something too weird for Nike, you can watch an earlier ad she made that was, er, deployed in the marketplace. From January 2017, here’s a video apparently promoting tights:
