Elegant split-screen editing as Nike hopes to inspire togetherness.

Details at AdWeek: "Clever Video Editing Portrays a Message of Unity in Nike’s Latest Powerful Spot/Wieden+Kennedy produced the third ad in 'You Can't Stop Us' campaign."

Like the other two spots in the campaign, “You Can’t Stop Us,” which has the same name as the overall campaign, draws on the sense of community from being socially isolated during a global pandemic. However, unlike the other two spots, the third 1.5-minute video also touches on the feelings stirred by the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky.

The voiceover narration is done by Megan Rapinoe, the soccer player.

Ah! I'm glad to see that I didn't just imagine that I'd created a tag "oneness."

ADDED: I had to publish this post and click on the tag to see where I got the idea the idea that "oneness" was going to be important. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I see that the last time I used it was on November 15, 2008 for "The Office of the President-Elect speaks!/Listen up!"



Oh, my Lord, did I think Obama was going to bring us together? No, no, actually not. I had my cruel neutrality:

I'm afraid he's going to be boring! Did he say anything other than what we already know? There's a big economic problem. Mmm hmm. A fair amount of my attention focused on the almost-readable writing on that thing in the lower right-hand corner. Is that the pot that plant is in -- maybe it says "Arthur" -- or a separate plaque sort of a thing? Anyway, he said something about how the country can "rise again" and how we all need to sacrifice because we all "rise or fall" as "one people." All this rising and oneness...

ALSO: But that Office-of-the-President-Elect-Obama post was the last time I'd used the tag "oneness." When was the first? The first was in March 2, 2005, a little over a year after I started this blog: "Students distracting students -- classroom wireless access." I'm surprised the subject of students paying 100% attention in class caused me to make the tag "oneness"!

The second time I used the tag, on April 17, 2006, was to talk about a VH-1 survey that found that the best line in a song ever is "One Life, With Each Other, Sisters, Brothers."

The third time, on October 6, 2007, was to quote this line: "Brooklyn principles can be found anywhere that young people gather to share their search for love and meaning, a search that they alone are qualified to pursue by virtue of their pristine vision of the deep oneness of things. Whereas physical danger or emotional grief leaves most people lonely or ruined or dead, they triumph over adversity." Ha ha. I was living in Brooklyn that year.

The fourth, on May 9, 2008, was "Does this statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. look too much like that statue of Saddam Hussein we pulled down in Baghdad?" Oh! This needs my new "destruction of art" tag. I'm very interested to encounter the subject of pulling down statues. Some people were concerned that the sculpture of MLK for the new D.C. memorial looked "too 'confrontational' and reminiscent of political art in totalitarian states." I said:

[O]nce you decide you want a large statue of a man, what is going to prevent it from looking like social realist sculptures? It's inherent in the concept. If social realist statues bother you, maybe you shouldn't order a colossus....

Would you reject the brooding, downcast Lincoln sculpture [at the Lincoln Memorial] if you were seeing it for the first time?... Oh, good Lord, he's so depressed! His clothes are horribly sagging. And he's slumping in that chair with his big, gawky hands hanging over those big Roman fasces. Fascism!

I guess I was using "oneness" to avoid tag proliferation. Did I not have a "fascism" tag back then?

My only other "oneness" post, the fifth use of the tag, was November 12, 2008: "Obama's not megalomaniacal. He's Whitmanesque." I quote another blogger who says, "Like Whitman, Obama is wholly himself and the embodiment of us. Both meld individual self with national identity." I said:

Meld individual self with national identity... Hmm. It's one thing for a poet to do that, but for a political leader? I will refrain from naming the leaders that spring to mind. The embodiment of us.... But what if I don't want to be embodied?

At Grant Park, Obama was evidence that, as Whitman wrote in the preface to his epic “Leaves of Grass,” “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” Obama absorbs Whitman, we absorb Obama, and “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”

So are we absorbing him, or is he absorbing us? I'm not sure how this Oneness is supposed to proceed.