If there’s one company that never fails to wow its audience with its mobile marketing initiatives, that company is Nike.

The Nike Id Iphone App

Take their new IPhone app, Nike Id. It could have been just another app to customize a pair of sneakers and locate the nearest store. But there is more than that. The app doesn’t just put colors in the right places on trainers designs, it also allows users to create new ones, by using iPhone images or pictures from the phone.

All you have to do is extract the correct color palette from the picture and express it in the form of your very own unique trainers. Still unsatisfied with the color scheme? Shake your iPhone to shuffle shades and get new results.

The app even lets users make iPhone wallpapers, share them with their friends online and obviously order the final creations.

Other remarkable mobile Nike initiatives from the last couple of years.

Nike T90 Augmented Reality Hunt

To promote the launch of Nike’s T90 boot during the Euro 2008, a series of black and white markers were posted in Nike stores, subway stations and magazines throughout Hong Kong.
Once users found a marker, they could text the keyword in it, to download a Nike ‘Augmented Reality‘ application.

Marker for Nike Augmented Reality Hunt

After loading the app and pointing the camera at the code, it became a virtual 3d T90 boot and ball, rotating in sync with the user’s cell phone movement around it.  The hunt continued by texting a special code found withing the 3d graphic and a final sweepstakes for Nike merchandise made some players even happier. Enjoy the promo video!

Nike Zoom

For the launch of Nike Zoom performance shoes in China, Nike set up an urban race in which consumers could participate to win a new pair of the Zoom high performance shoes. The Bluetooth-enabled race started at an illuminated outdoor site up to 400m from the store featuring a line up of 21 new Zoom shoes and ended at the Nike stores.
The fastest runner was given a pair of new Zooms and got their name placed in the illuminated site.

Results according to Mindshare, the agency behind the campaign: across three cities in three weeks, 250 000 Bluetooth messages delivered, 15 000 participants and 63 pairs of Nike Zoom shoes awarded, 1.7 billion online impressions, 19 million print impressions and 17 million OOH target audience impressions.

Nike and Times Square

While our Asian pals run around, New York got a  23-story interactive billboard in Times Square displaying customisable footwear from the Nike ID range.  Users could just dial the number on the billboard and use the phones keypad to start customising the on-screen shoe in real time! After playing with the billboard, a text message with a link to download a wallpaper of the just created design got sent to the user with an option to buy the shoe.

Nike Times Square Billboard

Nike Street Canvas

Another idea to customize a shoe: take a picture of something you like with your phone, send it to a number as a MMS, and you get back the link to your shoe, customised using the colors from the photo. As with the Billboard campaign, users were offered the option to either download the wallpaper of their Nike or directions to go purchase them right away!