This is a wild story.
Advertising executive Dan Wieden sat down with Dezeen magazine to described how he came up with the most famous tag line/slogan in sports marketing history.
Wieden — the man behind Nike’s famous “Just Do It” slogan — admitted in the interview that he borrowed it from the last words of a convicted murderer.
“I was recalling a man in Portland,” Wieden told Dezeen, remembering how in 1988 he was struggling to come up with a line that would tie together a number of different TV commercials the fledgling agency had created for the sportswear brand.
“He grew up in Portland, and ran around doing criminal acts in the country, and was in Utah where he murdered a man and a woman, and was sent to jail and put before a firing squad. They asked him if he had any final thoughts and he said: ‘Let’s do it’. I didn’t like ‘Let’s do it’ so I just changed it to ‘Just do it’.”
The slogan — first used in a television commercial in 1988 — quickly became a hit and launched Nike into the worldwide leader in the manufacturing of sports apparel and equipment it is today.