Nike's Phil Knight resigns as CEO

[ASsman]

Nike's Phil Knight resigns as CEO

By Anne M. Peterson
The Associated Press

PORTLAND — Phil Knight said yesterday he is resigning as president and chief executive of Nike but will remain chairman of the world's largest athletic shoe and clothing maker at a time when sales for the "swoosh" logo are growing around the globe.

Phil Knight built $12 billion global business.



http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002095212_nike19.html


"WOW! You guys are amazing!
I've only had my blackspots
ONE DAY and he resigned...
It's gotta be the shoes! Good Job!" - Liam

http://adbusters.org/metas/corpo/blackspotsneaker/home.html

" Enter the world's first global anti-brand: the Blackspot sneaker. A shoe and a message and a vision of the future. We've produced an environmentally friendly sneaker that's a bold statement against sweatshop labor. Our anti-corporate campaign is a bottom up enterprise that prioritizes ethical consumerism and grassroots empowerment. Join us in this quest to create an authentic, non-corporate cool and reassert consumer sovereignty over capitalism."

[ASsman]

Blackspot in the New York Times
Anti-Ad Group Tries Advertising
By Nat Ives
New York Times

Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters magazine, hopes his anti-ad organization's ads for Blackspot sneakers will undermine Nike.

The Adbusters Media Foundation, an advocacy group based in Vancouver, Canada, that wants to reduce marketers' influence over culture, is getting into the marketing game itself - with sneakers meant to nip at Nike's heels.

An ad campaign promotes the first consumer product offering from Adbusters, Blackspot sneakers, selling for $47.50, plus shipping and handling.

They are made of hemp fabric in a Portuguese factory where workers receive payhigher than the country's minimum wage and where many belong to a union. People who buy the sneakers receive what the company calls a "shareholder certificate" for Blackspot Anticorporation, giving them a voice in future anticorporate decisions of the venture if it succeeds. The shares are not traded, and the anticorporation is not listed on any exchange.

More than socially conscious business, though, Blackspots are meant to take aim at Nike, the megamarketer in sports shoes."Can a maverick brand of social marketers on a shoestring budget bring the empire to its knees?" the group asks on its Web site. "That is exactly what our Blackspot venture aims to do."

The "empire" in question, of course, is Nike, which Adbusters disdains for past labor practices it calls exploitative as well as for powerful marketing campaigns that enlist celebrity athletes like Tiger Woods, Mia Hamm and LeBron James.

"Rethink the cool," a planned billboard ad says, next to a black, scrawled renderingof the famous Nike swoosh.

Blackspots bear a perhaps deliberate resemblance to the low-tops sold by Converse, which Nike acquired in September 2003. They are marked, however, with hand-drawn white circles on the side - the "antilogo," as Adbusters puts it - and a small red dot on each toe meant to symbolize kicking Nike.

Despite all the bravado, Blackspots may prove far more significant for Adbusters and groups like it than for Nike, said John Horan, publisher at Sporting Goods Intelligence, an industry newsletter.

"The days when anybody with a glue pot could get into the sneaker business are so far behind us," Mr. Horan said. "I think it's more about traction in the media than consumers."

Kalle Lasn, editor in chief of Adbusters magazine, agreed that the shoes are primarily a new vehicle for the group's message. Selling shoes imbued with an anticorporate message is a new kind of activist movement, he said, calling it "culturejamming."

"We've stumbled upon this new way of marketing that leverages a large corporation's dirty deeds against itself," Mr. Lasn said. The shoes are available in some stores, as well as online.

Nike executives, not surprisingly, disagreed that the company deserved to be a target.

"Nike's got a strong commitment to corporate responsibility and to being transparentabout our efforts in this area," said Caitlin Morris, senior manager for global issues management at Nike.

Ms. Morris said Nike worked to maintain good working conditions for its worldwide labor force, had specific criteria for selecting which factories to use and had a compliance team of 90 people to make sure everything went as agreed. Nike is also a member of the Fair Labor Association, which monitors clothing and footwear factory conditions, she said, adding, "Nike's come a long way in the last five years."Nor did Ms. Morris agree that paid endorsements from athletes dupe or overwhelm consumers. "What the brand-name athletes they're referring to do is provide us insights into the performance of the product," Ms. Morris said. "Performing well in it gives that product authenticity."

The Blackspot campaign, created by an Adbusters unit called Powershift, has already run into a rough patch. Adbusters had planned to raise the "Rethink the cool" billboard near Nike's headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., last Wednesday, but hit a roadblock over the scrawled rendering of a Nike swoosh.

" Viacom Outdoor standards and practices policy does not allow for trademark infringement, which may be the case here," said Dana McClinton, a spokesman for the billboard owner. Lawyers for Adbusters and Nike are conferring on the issue.

Adbusters plans to expand the campaign in November to television networks like MTV and print publications like The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. That would provide new visibility for Adbusters, whose voice so far has been largely limited to the pages of its magazine, a bimonthly ad-free glossy publication that sells for $7.95 and generates roughly 90 percent of the organization's funding.

It would also be a reversal of fortune of sorts for a 15-year-old group founded after Mr. Lasn and others were rebuffed in efforts to buy commercial time on the broadcast networks for spots advocating Buy Nothing Day, another bid to resist the power of marketing in culture. Since then, Adbusters has succeeded in placing Buy Nothing Day spots only on CNN; other channels have declined them, citing policies against advocacy ads.

But it remains unlikely that Nike will notice an impact on its bottom line. Nike, with about $3 billion in United States footwear sales last year, represents some 36.4 percent of the nation's $8.3 billion branded athletic shoe market, according to Sporting Goods Intelligence.

Nike said yesterday that its overall earnings for the most recent quarter climbed 23 percent, better than expected, on solid demand for high-end running and basketball shoes in the United States.

[cosmo105]

awesome. i <3 adbusters.