During television coverage of the Olympic Games, the first of three US-only Nike advertisements aired. US TV viewer Brian Anastasi described one of the ads on the AriseAction email discussion list: "[It opens] with a woman taking her shirt off, getting ready to have a shower. She thinks she hears something, so she opens the door. On the other side of the door is a man with a hockey goalie mask on, with a running chainsaw in his hand. She screams and runs out the door (wearing only a bra on the top half of her body and her regular clothes on the bottom half) and into the woods ... with the man and his chainsaw in hot pursuit.
"The man eventually tires, goes down on his knees, puts down the chainsaw, and takes off his mask. This is when the only words come on the screen: 'Why Sport? You'll live longer', followed by the Nike slogan 'Just do it' and the swoosh logo."
On September 18, US television network NBC informed Nike that it was discontinuing the advertisement because of viewer complaints. Nike's US marketing vice-president, Mike Wilskey, said, "This ad will continue to run in other media. Our rule has always been to respect the intelligence of our consumer ... We know they get the joke."
The ad features Suzy Hamilton, an athlete competing in the Olympic 1500 metre race in Sydney. Hamilton was surprised that not everyone saw the joke. "Personally, I thought it was incredibly funny. It's a take-off on movies like Scream. I have received wonderful feedback from teenagers and younger kids ... We didn't want people to feel uncomfortable. We wanted to make people laugh."
In a September 13 media statement announcing the series of advertisements, Wilskey said, "The 'Why Sport' messages express fundamental truths about sport in new ways. We want people to view the ads and think: I never thought of sport that way."
Nike achieved this, but in a way different from what its executives were hoping for. Enough viewers did not share Wilskey's sense of humour and found the portrayal of attempted violence against a woman offensive, rather than satirically side-splitting.
Are these people just humourless, "politically correct" bores with less intelligence than the average TV viewer, as Wilskey would have us believe? Do they just not get it?
"The State of World Population 2000" report released on September 20 by the United Nations Population Fund estimates that one woman in three will experience violence, most often at the hands of someone she knows. UNICEF this year estimated that in the US, 22.1% of women have been assaulted by a male partner, and this figure does not include rape or sexual assault, which is considered vastly under-reported.
Violence is not a trivial issue. While it is extremely unlikely that many women will face a goalie-masked, chainsaw-wielding assailant, violence in many forms is a feature of too many women's lives.
Most people know the difference between "cartoon" violence and that which is closer to reality. Arguments against the depiction of violence span the spectrum of those who want all violence removed from the media to advocates for the elimination of "realistic" violence only.
Maybe in cartoons the would-be victim can be humorously portrayed as smug in the knowledge that their superior fitness can save them from a violent and untimely end, but in a television commercial where the satire is obviously not clear, the result is seen by many as just bad taste and offensive marketing.
BY MARGARET ALLUM