Air Max Day 2021

While Air Max Day is usually celebrated through events and in-store activations, due to uncertainty around Covid-19 restrictions, JD Sports and Nike engaged Tundra to bring Air Max Day 2021 to life online for customers and loyal fans.

Tundra was tasked to build a digital hub to house all campaign activities. This included a sophisticated photo editing tool where users could interact and create their own Air Max campaign creative using assets from Nike and local artists.

The overarching campaign and online hub were promoted via social media and digital OOH to gain momentum and encourage engagement online.

We worked with Space Between who led the creative development to finalise the requirements of the hub at project kick off.

Together, we quickly identified the need to publish pieces of content and to open up different sections of the hub in a staggered schedule throughout the campaign period. This was not online due to the reality of when pieces of content would be available (due to talent availability), but also to serve as a reason for engaged users to keep returning to the hub; to see new content or to increase their chances to win.

While the hub featured exclusive content from local artists, an Air Max product release calendar, there were also two competitions available. The first was a sliding puzzle game, where users completed the scrambled puzzle for a chance to win, with a different puzzle released each week.

However, the main competition on the hub was the ‘Build Your Own Campaign’ tool. Here, users were encouraged to upload their own photos utilising Nike assets or those commissioned from local artists, as a base for their design canvas. They could then use the tool to edit or manipulate the elements on their canvas to create a bespoke design for the Air Max campaign. These designs were submitted and displayed in the gallery section of the hub to serve as inspiration for other visitors.

Sections and subsections of the hub were each set to release on a predefined date and time. This was to ensure the constant updating of content, even over weekends.

To create the ‘Build Your Own Campaign’ tool, we utilised a VueJS frontend framework to build ‘photoshop-esqe’ functionality such as moving selected assets, rotating, resizing as well as applying filters such as blur, hue, glow and more custom filters like RGB Split and noise.

Given all of the different photo editing options available within the tool, it was important to not present all options to the user at once, but find a way to let the UI guide them in a subtle step-by-step process; letting them learn the tool and feel more confident to further experiment with its features.

Once we had the base functionality implemented in the tool, we stress tested this with different users and performed a series of iterative updates to the tool until we found the best layout for the canvas, the UI controls and the competition entry elements within the page.

Given that most users would be driven here from JD’s social channels we paid particular attention to the mobile version of the hub to ensure the full experience could be enjoyed on smaller screens.

The ‘build your own campaign’ element of the Air Max Day hub generated hundreds of entries within the first few days of going live.

The designs created through the ‘Build Your Own Campaign’ tool resulted in so many high quality pieces of content, that JD Sports chose to feature many of these on their Instagram account to further extend the life of the campaign.

Overall both JD Sports and Nike were successfully able to provide a unique engaging experience to their Air Max audience, and for the first time in a purely digital execution.