Nike and Agency Partners Win Adweek Media Plan of the Year

Last summer, Nike launched its boldest campaign in years, “Winning Isn’t for Everyone,” reflecting the brand’s embrace of the motivation powering the world’s best athletes: that the pursuit of victory and the passion for winning can be the ultimate source of inspiration. Now, the campaign has won a major industry award, earning Nike and its agency partners, including PMG, Weiden+Kennedy, and Initiative, the prestigious 2025 Adweek Media Plan of the Year award among campaigns with a budget of $10 million or more.

In the lead-up to the Paris Olympics, Nike aimed to remind the world that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to win. Engineered for maximum cultural impact, the campaign featured an anthem film starring Nike’s iconic athletes and voiced by Willem Dafoe, which was launched across Nike’s social media days before the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, triggering a global media rollout across owned, earned, and paid channels.

Timed to dominate high-traffic moments and Gen Z platforms alike, the campaign bridged sport and pop culture. The out-of-home plan integrated a mix of hand-painted wallscapes, digital spectaculars, building wraps, and guerrilla-style communications across 11 countries. Throughout the Games, we launched 13 athlete films that brought winning to life, and each film was aired during specific live Olympic and gold medal moments on NBC and Peacock in the U.S. and across other media platforms worldwide. At the same time, we created and dropped 24 different athlete “WIN” reactives in real time, across social and digital OOH. Within minutes, our bespoke reactive ads went live across digital out-of-home in Nike’s key cities, showcasing its biggest Olympians with real imagery of their golden moment from the IOC, and turning media into live Olympic celebrations. 

The campaign reignited the brand’s voice at a moment when cultural relevance and commercial impact were both on the line. Nike became the most dominant brand of the Games, owning a majority of all Olympic social conversation, surpassing all official Olympic sponsors. Positive sentiment outpaced benchmarks, and the campaign also experienced a notable surge in Google search. Most critically, the work delivered commercially.

By embedding a provocative, athlete-driven POV into every screen and moment, our collective teams helped Nike shift the conversation, reclaim its edge, and prove that breakthrough thinking, executed at scale, drives real business results.