Aw Hell, This Nike “Puppet” Disaster Is Still Going

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↵So now it’s already about next year. Great.
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↵One of the most unsettling aspects of the Nike Puppet campaign is the underlying subtext to it all (this, by the way, is also a sure sign that one might be overthinking things a lot; this being Nike and marketing, though, let’s just say “accidents rarely occur”). Considering the grousing about how much the league wanted LeBron vs. Kobe in the playoffs (and hey, why not want that?) to the point that the officials were in the tank for each (okay, something wrong with that), portraying the players as “puppets” seems, in retrospect, to be at best an unfortunate coincidence.
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↵One of the things that make Kobe and LeBron so marketable, as a matter of fact, is the force of their games and personality: their ability to affect their environment and situation. Puppets, conversely, have no agency in their actions. They’re pushed, pulled, and manipulated into whatever an outside force sees fit.
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↵Even Kobe’s and LeBron’s voices, both distinctive in their own right, are missing from the commercials; their felt counterparts are voiced by Kenan Thompson and David Alan Grier. So while Thompson and DAG are very comedically talented, perhaps better suited for voicework in a commercial than the NBA superstars, it removes another aspect of the identity that Nike has worked so hard to sell for each player.
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↵And then there’s the faces, both in the cartoonish puppet mold. There’s nothing wrong with them, per se; a resemblence is there, as puppets go. But again, fans know and recognize the real faces better than just about anybody in the sport since, quite conceiviably, His Airness Himself. Why go away from what makes them marketable?
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↵There is no action or identity shared by the puppets with the players. They’re #24 and #23 in name and number only. These are not the Kobe or LeBron I know. And that is what I don’t like about the Nike campaign.↵