“Responding to events in real time—with corresponding artwork that is unpredictable until the moment it happens—provides the sense of magic and relevancy needed to keep users engaged and excited.” —juror Megan Meeker

“Nike’s idea extended the World Cup from the big screen to people’s personal screens. With amazing craft and technology, the idea was as scaled on the Internet as the World Cup itself.” —juror Mark Renshaw

Overview: As soccer’s greatest players took center stage during the 2014 World Cup, fans worldwide watched live in record numbers, mobile device in hand. Phenomenal Shot, part of the larger Risk Everything campaign executed by Nike and Wieden+Kennedy, captured Nike’s greatest athletes during “Did you see that?” moments. Seconds after big plays on TV, 3-D ads based on these moves ran across the Google Display Network. Fans could then use their mobile device—no app needed—to explore 360 degrees around a Nike athlete, capturing, remixing and sharing their own phenomenal shots.

•Phenomenal Shot was the seven-month-long combined effort of advertising agency Grow and its client, Google’s Creative Partnerships team; Nike and its agency, Wieden+Kennedy; Mindshare; Goo Technologies; and Passion Pictures.
•To enable fans to share their creations on their social media profiles, each user-generated scene was automatically exported as a GIF sequence.
•More than two million fans from 200 different countries engaged with the Phenomenal Shot experience during the 2014 World Cup. They made more than 500,000 Nike athlete remixes.

Comments by Grow:
What was the thinking behind the navigational structure? “We built Phenomenal Shot for an audience that loves to communicate with images. The experience was designed to feel comparable to popular photo-sharing apps, with a minimal, intuitive interface that would enable users to quickly capture, personalize and share a photo with the world.”

Did you meet with any out-of-the-ordinary obstacles during development? “The hardest challenge during development was managing the asset pipeline for our WebGL experience, the backbone of this project. We had a team in England converting high-resolution 3-D models into lower-resolution formats compatible with the web, then staging and lighting each pose and its environment. This whole process was done multiple times for multiple players over the course of the World Cup—and sometimes in a crazily condensed time frame to reflect a key move or play. We ended up incorporating seventeen fully rendered 3-D player models and five different player environments in WebGL.”

What software, back-end technology and programming languages were used? “Phenomenal Shot is an immersive experience for the mobile web, combining WebGL, HTML5 and JavaScript. At the hardware level, we tapped into the gyroscope so fans could move their mobile device to view their favorite Nike athletes in full 3-D space. The experience happened entirely within a browser, with no need to download an app. We used Google’s Cloud Platform environment on the back end.”