Now that it’s been a couple weeks since Nike initially triggered a bunch of flag-waving enthusiasts, my two cents on their ad featuring Colin Kaepernick:

1. The immediate stock price hit was to be expected. The Wall Street crowd leans conservative. I would have been stunned if it hadn’t dropped in the immediate aftermath. Nonetheless, it didn’t stop the anti-Kappers from gleefully using the stock price as an indicator that Nike’s gambit had hurt them. Clearly, they don’t understand how stock prices work and why the immediate was meaningless.
2. While Nike was definitely “taking sides,” that was tertiary to the ad’s primary goals: getting them lots of publicity above and beyond mere advertising, and selling more shoes and clothes. I think the fact that the campaign is still a large part of the national conversation shows the former worked exactly as planned. As for the latter, fact of the matter is that we won’t know how successful that was until Nike has issued at least a couple quarterly earning reports. In other words, it’ll be months before we know whether it increased sales or hurt them.
3. Millennials are the largest generation in American history, and now they are all adults. In addition, surveys and polls show that on average they are more liberal than Boomers or Gen Xers. They are also the group more likely to purchase the types of clothes and shoes made by Nike. Conversely, the people most likely to be annoyed at Nike for featuring Kaepernick are people who are buying less of that class of products. If you’re going to take a side, you should definitely choose the side that’s most likely to respond favorably to your advertising.
4. Nike spends enough money on marketing research and market surveys to give Miles Drentell an erection to rival that of John Holmes. Does anyone really think that they didn’t carefully consider all the pros and cons of this ad campaign?
5. Finally, there are plenty of far better reasons to stop buying Nike products than their decision to include Kaepernick in their ads. In fact, if you are using that as your rallying cry to boycott, then you clearly haven’t been paying attention to the wages and working conditions in their Asian factories over the past few decades. Either that, or this simply hasn’t bothered you in the past. I’ll leave it to you to decide which you think is actually worse.

Okay, that was more like a nickel than two cents. However, I also need to give Nike additional credit for getting me to finally get off my lazy ass and pound out something with more heft than my typical 100 words or less Facebook post. They’ll never know or care, but that’s okay — I’ve never purchased or worn any of their products anyway (though I certainly wouldn’t mind wearing them if they paid me to do so.)