Back in the late 80′s and early 90′s, Nike gave the whole sneaker game a lesson in the importance of marketing. As if it wasn’t enough that Michael Jordan was well on his way to becoming the greatest basketball player ever, his sneakers were becoming legendary in their own right. Besides Mike’s on-court success and the fact that the Air Jordan line of sneakers was on another level of style and design brilliance from anything else on the market, there was some marketing genius at work creating a mystique around Michael and his kicks in a way that had never been executed so brilliantly within the realm of athlete endorsements.
Joining Michael in many of these promotional endeavors was Spike Lee (a.k.a. Mars Blackmon), at the time an up and coming film director with a passion for Air Jordan sneakers. The two-man team of Spike and Mike partnered up for a series of commercials and print ads for the sneakers that were not only successful at the time, but have become infamous as some of the most effective and enduring ad campaigns of all time. After the jump, you can take a stroll down memory lane with a nice retrospective of the Michael Jordan/Mars Blackmon era and the marketing revolution that it helped to spark.
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