“I have no business doing a running commercial. 15 months ago, I was dead, right?” actor Jeremy Renner says with a wry smile.
After breaking 38 bones from a snowplow accident in 2023 that stopped his heart, Renner is back in a dramatic new campaign for the running shoe company Brooks. And he’s not just living. He’s running.
The spot kicks off Brooks’s first new global campaign in 25 years, which it’s launching after nine consecutive quarters of being the top running shoe brand in the U.S. After overtaking Nike in 2022, the company hasn’t looked back.
The ad’s slogan is “Let’s run there.” But its subtext is far richer: Everyone hits a moment in life, a moment in their body, that’s no longer about any measurable promise of winning, let alone being the best. And in this moment, “I find a lot of joy in just having the ability to move,” notes Renner.
The ad feels authentic because it is. Brooks didn’t employ an external ad agency, though the spot was produced by Venture Production Group. The company first reached out to Renner in 2023, once he started posting about his recovery on social media, by mailing him a pair of shoes—which Melanie Allen, CMO of Brooks, says was just about supporting his mission. “The team sends out a lot of gear,” Allen says. “We said, ‘Let’s send him some shoes; if we can help, that’s great.’”
They were ecstatic when Renner posted his first run back-and-forth in his driveway, wearing the Brooks Ghost Max they’d sent. Then he began interval training on this treadmill, also wearing Brooks.
Months later, as Brooks had its first meeting around its new mantra, considering who might be the face of its campaign, the conclusion was obvious. Not only was Renner’s story great, not only did he test well in younger and older demographics in Europe and Asia, he was a sincere fan.
The other reason the ad works
But the other reason the ad resonates for Brooks is that it is so directly tied to its products—which are designed to get everyday people to run.
Contrast that to Nike, which has long been focused on the elite athlete. Nike’s quest to break the 2-hour marathon alongside Eliud Kipchoge led it to develop a seismic shift in running shoes: no more minimalism. Instead, Nike built comically oversize outsoles. Using foams found in the airplane industry, and springy carbon plates, Nike was able to actually return a runner’s energy back to them with every stride. Called Vaporfly (and then Alphafly), the technology disrupted elite long-distance running. Marathoners who were sponsored by other brands literally spray-painted over the swoosh to stay competitive in 2020 before other brands caught on.
That elite-athlete obsession is very real in Beaverton, and in this instance, it paid off. When I reported my recent feature on Nike’s Olympics strategy, the design team shared a video of a feedback session with Kipchoge—along with some incredibly elegant sketches he made. This is a cerebral man, obsessed with the small details of his shoe. But I could see him supported shaping that shoe into something that was perhaps a personal, elite-performance product rather than a democratic one—which I concluded, as he specifically suggested chiseling away the outsole to shave weight. Nike even pointed the heel in this line (making it so hard to go around a turn confidently with any speed).
To woo runners now, however, even Nike is thinking about optimization differently—not just shaving weight but increasing the stability of every footfall and smoothing out the transition from your heel to your toe with its Alphafly 3. This is catch-up work to what Brooks has been onto for a while now—an approach that’s helped lead Brooks, which did $1.2 billion in revenue in the past year—to overtake the $55 billion giant in U.S. running, the very category that kicked off Nike’s entire business.
As Carson Caprara, Brooks’s SVP of footwear who leads design, explained to me earlier this year, Brooks has always been attuned to the sensation of its shoes—as an object that needs to get out of the way of your normal locomotion. “We are inspired by all areas of sport, but mostly people who lace up their shoes every day and go for a run,” he said then. “How can we give them a superhuman feel, keep them active longer?”
Brooks was so obsessed with that idea of empowering the individual that it actually eschewed the rise of the thick, energy-returning outsole trend Nike debuted with Vaporfly back in 2017. “The consumer was telling us they liked something about it . . . and the lesson we learned was, I’m embarrassed to say, we should have embraced it sooner, and tried to understand it,” says Caprara. “What was out there wasn’t perfect—it usually isn’t—but it challenged our assumptions, and once we embraced it, we were able to pull a new philosophy and science out of it.”
What Brooks learned was, these new foams were very pliable. So, it invested in sculpting them into a shoe that balanced your center of gravity atop the platform but still pushed you forward—and, most importantly, still felt like a Brooks. That brand feel is quantifiable, says Allen, from the step-in feel that hugs your foot immediately, without poking at it, to the tactility of the road to “ride” that feels like you’re propelled forward with every step. And advanced materials made it better.
“Whether you want to be fast and responsive, or forgiving and plush, the power of a shoe has been elevated,” says Caprara. “You put the shoe on, and you’re a better version of yourself.”
It is true—we live in the era of super shoes, but what makes a shoe super can be about more than pure speed. While a Nike Pegasus or early Alphafly feels something like ice skating on concrete, a Brooks Ghost Max feels like jogging on a wide pillow with a spring in the middle. It’s luxurious on my subpar knees, giving me just enough oomph that I can measurably feel that the shoe is helping me, like a friend, on my feet. Brooks sold a million pairs of Ghost Maxes in the first year they were out—the fastest-selling footwear Caprara had seen in his career. But what he appreciates most is that he himself was done running, too battered from injuries . . . until these new technologies came around. Caprara’s team literally designed a shoe that brought him back to the activity.
And evidently, that worked for Jeremy Renner, too.