Is Nike Taking A Gender Bias?

Nike, the longtime athletic clothing brand seems to have taken a new turn with their marketing and advertising plans. The sporting goods empire, which supplies equipment and clothing to major sports associations such as the NBA, NFL, MLB, as well as to professional athletes that play golf, tennis, or track and field has always portrayed men as the dominant, strong, and essentially the superior gender. Their use of women on the other hand has always been through the use of objectifying them and making them look "sexy", bombarding the viewers with amazingly fit women. Their commercials always involve the male doing acts, while the females in the commercials just... appear. Their ads constantly hold such strong gender roles, until one recent commercial was released, showing signs that their advertising campaign had gone through some changes.

Nike's new commercial which advertises their recently released shoe, the Nike Free+, uses completely different roles than what they previously have used. They take a couple that lives great distances apart, and they show the couple running to each other wearing their Nike Free+ shoes. The dominant and strong male eventually becomes unable to continue running because he is out of shape... not so dominant anymore. While the female in the relationship fights on, and keeps running across the country to her partner, who now lays weak and fragile in a hospital bed. Clearly Nike has flipped their campaign on how to approach the genders. Playing off love, they show a strong women who can run across the country purely off of love, and of course, her great Nike Free+ shoes, while the man lies pathetically in a hospital awaiting her. It's far from the usual Nike ads people are used to seeing, but it gives all those women out there a "cute" and "romantic" commercial, which is probably more effective towards the female Nike buyer anyways. After all, the female gender is where the money is at in the fashion and clothing industry, considering how quickly their wardrobes change and the constant need for new shoes. A great ad by Nike because of the removal of the standard gender roles that they usually would portray.