When Nike made Colin Kaepernick one of the faces of its new ad campaign back in early September, it was perhaps the most controversial commercial move the brand has made in its almost 50-year history. Immediate reaction was swift–the stock was down, the number of people posting videos showing how they’d burned their Nike gear was way up–and it initially appeared that this was a pretty big gamble.
Weeks later, there is more data measuring the reaction, and increasingly, this is looking like a marketing masterstroke. The latest is data Foursquare shared with Yahoo Finance, in which the location tech platform measured the difference in Nike store foot traffic between the week after Labor Day (September 4-10) and the week before Labor Day (August 21-27), then compared it to the same period in 2017, and found that overall foot traffic to 242 Nike stores in the U.S. went up by an average of 16.9%.
LIVE: Here's a look at the difference in $NKE sales between blue and red counties following the Colin Kaepernick ad. https://t.co/U211hPk0b5 pic.twitter.com/lIpk8R3JR8
— Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance) October 5, 2018
It also broke down its findings to show that foot traffic to Nike stores went up 27.3% in blue counties, and 8.5% in red counties. No word on how much of that 8.5% was just there to buy shoes to set on fire for Instagram.
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