In 1998, Nike launched an ad series, “What If We Treated All Athletes the Way We Treat Skateboarders?”, featuring parodies that portrayed runners, golfers, and tennis players being regulated and harassed for simply playing their sports. The quirky subversion of the public scrutiny skaters face reveals the brand’s ambition to enter the lucrative market of underground youth by showing it gets the community. Now considered iconic for its creativity, the campaign was received poorly by the skaters themselves at the time. Their skepticism toward outsiders’ image-making attests to the subculture’s anti-establishment values, which have long found expression in DIY practices of self-documentation.
