Walt Stack’s lesson for Nike 🏃🏼♂️, Starbucks takes a fashion bow, Alphabet at $3 trillion and all the latest in brand news
Issue #72
Weekly Exhale
Nike has revived its Just Do It tagline. More than 35 years old, and conceived—ironically—from the final words of a man about to die.
In 1976, Gary Gilmore was sentenced to death for two murders, the same year the U.S. reintroduced capital punishment. He refused appeals, demanded immediate execution. Offered a choice between hanging and firing squad, he chose the gun—more reliable.
In Draper, Utah, he was strapped to a chair, a black hood pulled over his head, a paper target pinned to his chest. Five volunteer marksmen fired.
His last words? "Let's do it."
And just like that, Gilmore became the first man executed in America in nearly a decade. And the unlikely inspiration for a sports shoe ad campaign.
So when Nicole Hubbard Graham, Chief Marketing Officer for Nike, announces the return of Just Do It as a call to action—and dutifully insists it's "more than just a tagline"—she's right.
Dead right.
Nike's creative roots have always been steeped in the real stuff. Where the dark, the random, the unsettling can tip into something accidentally genius. Only a few lines in marketing carry a shadow this long, and with such eerie prescience. Within Nike's long history of irreverence, these three words have carried further than most brands could ever dream to reach.
And their reintroduction comes at a telling moment.
Lately, Nike has been running on ageing knees. Creaky cartilage. Arthritic even.
In Q4 of fiscal 2025, sales fell 12% year on year. From the highs of 2021 to the lows of 2025, the company's valuation collapsed by 65%, wiping more than $150 billion of its shares.
The reasons are many. The pandemic over-developed Nike's direct-to-consumer muscle, leaving it lopsided. China, its second biggest market, faltered. Specialist brands like On Running nibbled at Nike's cankles. Data-led death spirals. And McKinsey decks became little more than bum padding before taking a spanking from the market.
What everyone agrees on is that Nike stopped making cool products. Lost sight of who it was.
"New" CEO Elliot Hill was a VP dragged out of retirement. He'd first walked into Nike as an intern in 1988, the year Just Do It was born. CMO Hubbard Graham was also a rehire, returning after 18 years at the company.
Nike was less interested in building something new so much as reclaiming what once felt valuable.
Well, almost.
Go back to that first Just Do It launch spot, and you'll see a single, shirtless runner: an eighty-year-old jogging across the Golden Gate Bridge. Asked how he keeps his teeth from chattering in winter, he shrugs: "I leave them in the locker."
The new ad? Carlos Alcaraz, Saquon Barkley, Caitlin Clark, Tara Davis-Woodhall, Shreyas Iyer, LeBron James, Rayssa Leal, Scottie Scheffler, Vini Jr., Hunter Woodhall, Qinwen Zheng. And, as if that weren't enough, Tyler, The Creator on voiceover.
For Nike, Just Do It works like a Zip file, compressing the brand's entire story.
The trouble is, this new campaign doesn't add much to the folder.
Reality? Reviving slogans is more like polishing up advertising furniture from a bygone age, when stories built to a payoff, an end frame. Like anything old, they demand time, conviction, consistency—more than marketing can usually muster in the two-second blur brands are born in today.
Truthfully, the revival of Just Do It isn't for consumers at all. It's corporate self-talk. Affirmations in the mirror, said loudly enough for investors to overhear. At best, TikTok's marketing oracles turn the comeback into a fight, feeding the algorithm what it really wants: an argument.
But let's be real. Most of us never retired Just Do It from our minds in the first place.
__
The 80-year-old runner in Nike's original ad was Walt Stack. A cement mason with a Popeye jaw, a foul mouth, and a smile that had weathered its share of punches. He lived nearly a century, endured a brutal childhood, even served time in Alcatraz.
And still he kept running. Every single day. Until the end, 1995, seven years after making the spot.
His routine was religious. Each morning, Walt pulled on a bright red cap, biked six miles to the Golden Gate Bridge, stripped to his shorts, and ran across to Sausalito. Then back again—seventeen miles. After that? A swim in the freezing bay. He became such a fixture that locals nicknamed him "Mayor of the Golden Gate Bridge," and when he died, San Francisco's newspapers reported it as if a statesman had passed.
But Walt actually came late to running. He was 57. And he wasn't fast: 8.5 minutes a mile, never more. Sports Illustrated once joked that if Walt ever fell out of an airplane, he'd hit the ground at 8.5 minutes per mile. His motto? Start slow, then taper off.
Back in the day, endurance races never had cut-off times. So Walt would take the whole day, sometimes two. Along the way, he'd stop for pancakes and coffee. He'd finish shirtless, tattooed, grinning and holding a beer, offering swigs to fellow runners.
And while he stood for the old and the slow, that wasn't the whole story. He also stood for women, at a time when doctors claimed that women's bodies couldn't endure the strain.
Walt thought that was nonsense.
His wife was an activist who helped change U.S. labour law. Her influence led Walt to help organise women's long-distance runs, paving the way for the first women's Olympic marathon in Los Angeles, 1984.
Joan Ullyot, iconic marathon runner and a key figure in the fight, wrote in Walt's biography: "Underneath the rough exterior, the corny jokes, there is a dedicated idealist. Women laugh at his off-colour remarks and enjoy his frank admiration, because they realise Walt is the greatest feminist amongst us."
If Just Do It was born from a shooting in Utah, it re-emerges now against fresh headlines from the same state. For Walt, running was a bridge—to Sausalito, and to something larger. "You can be a real Bircher, I can be a Communist, and I can still love you because I figure you're a runner. You're a good Joe, and you'll feel the same way about me."
Nike's CMO, Hubbard Graham, nodded to an "80-year-old runner" when announcing the return of the brand's iconic line. But she didn't mention Walt's name. And so, amid a montage of global stars—LeBron, Alcaraz, Caitlin Clark, Tyler, The Creator—Walt Stack, the heart of it all, was missing.
And yet Walt's philosophy of Just Do It is the real one: keep going, keep laughing.
And in a signed copy of his book, he made it simpler still:
Dear runner. Keep breathing. Walt.
That's the part brands lose sight of. They pitch greatness. They sell aspiration. But most people are just trying to get by. One step, then the next.
Real greatness lives in the little things. The messy, ordinary, staying-alive kind of greatness. Small and steady. The kind we so often let slip past without reminding ourselves it's there.
Love for yourself. Love for the stranger running beside you.
Together on the long road across the bridge.
Every single day.
The way Walt showed us.
Let's rise together with every issue. ♡
Market Moves
U.K. jobless market implies Bank of England to hold rates | The Wall Street Journal
U.K. estimates for productivity to be downgraded | Financial Times
Rachel Reeves pledges to cut more regulators at private equity meeting | The Guardian
U.S. toying with scrapping quarterly reporting | CNBC
Brand Beat
Nike headed for 'swoosh' shaped recovery | Market Watch
Luckin Coffee challenges Starbucks with aggressive US expansion | Entrepreneur
McDonald’s invests $200 million in regenerative technology | AP News
Gwyneth Paltrow unveils her new fashion line | Vogue
Liquid Death and Boost Mobile launch co-branded ad campaign | Mediacat
L’Oréal Paris dethrones Charlotte Tilbury | Cosmetics Business
U.K. advertising watchdog accused of flouting its own campaign rules | The Guardian
JCPenney preps holiday season with laugh-out-loud deals | Marketing Dive
Starbucks takes center stage at New York Fashion Week | WWD
Brazilian fashion collaboration breathes new life into Barbour | Harper's Bazaar
Doja Cat’s lipstick stunt is the ultimate celebrity endorsement | The Times
Vibe marketing blends precise execution with creative imagination | TechRadar
Jaguars boss won’t reverse rebrand despite fan uproar | The Wall Street Journal
American Eagle stock jumps 24% on Sydney Sweeney ad campaign | New York Post
YouTube unveils generative AI tools for creators and viewers | Bloomberg
Trump administration reaches framework to avoid TikTok ban | Mashable
...and sues New York Times for $15 billion | Fast Company
Channel 4 plans longest uninterrupted reel of Trump’s untruths | The Guardian
Roblox faces wrongful death lawsuit after teen’s suicide | The New York Times
Lime bikes enjoy a London tube strike moment | Brand Builder’s Blueprint
Pornhub traffic dips during Apple event but holds on Android | Mashable
System1's ad of the week goes to Cologuard | System1
Trending: Tinkr—aesthetically designed tools | Thingtesting
Starting Up
Klarna IPO turns 40 employees into millionaires | Sifted
Robotics startup Figure now valued at $39 billion | Reuters
U.K. risks becoming incubator economy | City A.M.
$30M startup builds pet–sized robot factory that learns from humans | TechCrunch
Questioning start-up margins is boring cliché | a16z
AI startup founders and the sleepless, booze-free grind | The Wall Street Journal
Little Spoon says losing a major deal saved their startup | Inc.
Robotics startups enter a golden age beyond AI | TechCrunch
Tech Tidbits
Elon Musk briefly loses world's richest title | Entrepreneur
OpenAI’s $300 billion Oracle deal triggers AI bubble alarms | Fortune
Alphabet hits $3 trillion market cap amid AI momentum | Reuters
AI isn't in one bubble but three distinct ones | Fast Company
Googlers are mocking you—can you really blame them? | The Media Leader
Tesla pivots to robots as investors question sales and valuation | Bloomberg
Google admits open web is rapidly declining | The Verge
AI pressure keeps Sam Altman awake since ChatGPT launched | Fortune
Venture Vibes
Venture Capital ruined the CPG space | Feed Me
Robinhood launches publicly traded venture capital fund | The New York Times
Index's Danny Rimer’s bet on Figma at seed stage | Fortune
Report: UK Venture capital market performance 2025 | Finsmes
Vibe-coding platform Replit nets $3 billion valuation | Bloomberg
Design Driven
OpenAI unveils first AI animated film at Cannes | #WERSM
Supreme x Nike revamp Air Force 1 Low with timeless twist | Stupid Dope
Herman Miller revamps classic Eames chair with sustainable materials | Design Milk
Katherine McMahon’s neon sign art lights up London | Cool Hunting
Happiness
How loneliness is reshaping the modern workplace | Harvard Business Review
Guttenberg to Zuckerberg: How to handle disruption | Big Think
Walt Stack, 87, beloved San Francisco runner and icon | Los Angeles Times
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