In the summer of 2024, Nike launched a new brand identity focused on winning alongside the world’s biggest sporting event. To bring this vision to life, Nike hosted multiple Victory Mode events across Paris, aimed at getting local youth involved in sports.
However, Paris posed a unique challenge—only 9% of the city has fields for play, leaving many teens without a place to compete or even practice. Despite the city’s passion for sports, physical spaces were limited. With Snapchat reaching over 90% of French youth, our brands saw a unique opportunity to engage teens and redefine sports and competition, even in a city with limited access to traditional playing fields.
Idea
We created a first-of-its-kind, real-time AR spatial competition that transformed the sky above Paris into a playing field and the city itself into a giant playground. The real-time AR Lens connected exclusive Nike experiences into a unified gamified environment, merging the physical and digital worlds across the city and at Nike events.
Innovation
Challenges
The biggest challenge was building an AR experience on a scale unlike anything Snapchat had supported before.
The complexity of multiple lens features—wayfinding, gamification, and a global leaderboard with custom ranking targeted to the entire city of Paris—overloaded our usual backend infrastructure. But we didn’t just see these challenges as obstacles—we saw them as opportunities to redefine the possibilities of AR.
We utilized Snapchat's proprietary Lens Cloud technology to optimize assets and dynamically load features as users interacted with the experience in real-time. This allowed us to deliver a seamless experience, one that was fast, responsive, and free from lag, ensuring optimal performance.
From the onset, our goal was to create a citywide, immersive experience that not only drove participation but also deepened Nike's connection with teens who didn't have access to open fields of play. By integrating AR at the forefront of our strategy, we successfully engaged teens in new ways, keeping them active and connected with Nike.
Impact
This wasn’t just a campaign—it was a new way of thinking about how teens engage with sports and brands. And in the end, we showed that for Nike, the sky’s no longer the limit. the end, we showed that for Nike, the sky’s no longer the limit.
