Advertising

Air sneak attack

by Stephen Heuser

FALSE ADVERTISING: Nike walks a fine line.

If you ride the Green Line through Park Street, you've probably noticed the billboards. For the second year in a row, Nike has splashed an entire wall of Park Street Station with ads hyping the city's biggest sporting event, the Boston Marathon.

You may also have noticed that for the second year in a row, Nike does not actually use the words "Boston Marathon" in its ads. The reason: legally, it can't. The official footwear sponsor of the marathon is archrival Adidas. So for the second year in a row, race organizers at the Boston Athletic Association are officially irked.

"We view it as something that's quite unfortunate," says Guy Morse, the BAA's race director. "It's predictable, and it's typical of [Nike's] marketing style," which he characterizes as "leeching off" the race's image.

Nike's blowout Park Street campaign is a big win for the T, which is netting $55,000 for this year's billboards. It's less of a win for Adidas, which pays the BAA upward of $1 million in gear and cash for the right to use the marathon's name in its ads.

Nike spokesperson Dave Mingey (who, coincidentally, attended college on the marathon route at BC), says Nike's ads are "not an infringement of any trademark or licensing thing," and that Nike is "very aware of where the lines are and careful not to cross them." At an event the size of the marathon, he says, "There's a certain competitiveness among not only the athletes, but also the companies."

There sure is. Last year in New York, Nike yanked its official sponsorship of that city's marathon and spent the money instead on a New York Marathon-related marketing assault, which involved an army of college students impersonating street-corner preachers throughout Manhattan. (Don't ask.) By those standards, an MBTA billboard blitz seems almost understated.

Still, there's plenty of entertainment value in watching an advertiser bend over backward to create Boston Marathon ads that don't actually mention the marathon. ("They're very shrewd in knowing just how far they can go," says the BAA's Morse.) This year, the Park Street billboards have no wording at all. They're numbered, and arranged to evoke the race scenery mile by mile. Billboard 0 shows the intersection in Hopkinton where the race begins. Billboard 26.2 shows the Boston Public Library, where the race ends. Between them are fashionably overexposed fragments of Ashland, Framingham, Wellesley, Cleveland Circle, and so on.

For anyone who's run the race, the recognition is instant. For everyone else, it must seem a little cryptic, although one detail is unmistakable: the stark white swoosh hovering over every scene.