The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 1999
Just For Feet's Super Bowl ad simulated drugging a Black runner to sell Nikes
A 1999 Super Bowl spot showed hunters drugging a barefoot Kenyan runner and forcing shoes on him. The backlash came months before the retailer's bankruptcy.
Just For Feet · Saatchi & Saatchi Business Communications · 1999-01-31
What happened
During Super Bowl XXXIII, sneaker retailer Just For Feet aired a spot from its Rochester, NY agency, Saatchi & Saatchi Business Communications: a white hunting party in a Humvee tracks a barefoot Kenyan runner across the savanna, drugs his water, and forces Nike shoes onto his unconscious feet. He wakes, rejects the shoes, and flees. The full campaign, including the media buy and supporting print, cost roughly $7 million.
The reaction was immediate. The New York Times called it 'appallingly insensitive'; Ad Age's critic called it 'neo-colonialist' and 'probably racist.' Just For Feet sued Saatchi for $10 million for advertising malpractice that March, arguing the ad had damaged the brand rather than built it.
The lawsuit went nowhere: Just For Feet filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 1999, ten months after the ad aired, undone by over-expansion and inventory problems the ad campaign had not fixed. Its stores and brand were later sold to Footstar for about $70 million.
Why it happened
- Nobody in the approval chain flagged that a scene of forcibly drugging a Black man to sell sneakers would read as racist.
- A $7M Super Bowl spot was bet on shock value at a company that was already financially fragile from rapid store expansion.
- Management responded to the backlash by suing its own agency rather than addressing why the ad was approved in the first place.
The lesson
A single tone-deaf flagship ad can't be undone by suing the agency that made it — the approval failure was the client's, and the financial damage was already underway.
Aftermath
Just For Feet's assets were sold to Footstar in 2000. The ad remains a standard case study in advertising ethics courses on how not to represent race, and on the limits of blaming an agency for work the client signed off on.
Sources
- Salon — The ad from hell
- The New York Times — Company News; Footstar Plans To Pick Up Some Assets of Just For Feet
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