skills/creative-director/references/legendary-campaigns/cards/nike-what-are-girls-made-of-2017.md

---
id: nike-what-are-girls-made-of-2017
title: "What Are Girls Made Of?"
brand: Nike
agency: Wieden+Kennedy
year: 2017
country: RU
region: europe
industry: sports
pattern: [P16, P13]
category: film
idea_type: campaign
involvement: passive_view
channel: digital
duration: campaign
goal: [awareness, advocacy, purpose]
budget: medium
emotion: [defiant, proud, vulnerable_defiance]
emotion_tier: 3
insight_domain: identity
media_epoch: social
awards: [unknown]
quality_score: 8
scalability: regional
risk: edgy
confidence: high
quality: full
source_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_iCIISngdI
---

# What Are Girls Made Of? (Nike Russia · 2017)

## Insight
In Russia, a traditional nursery rhyme assigns girls sugar and spice — passive, sweet qualities. Female athletes in Russia negotiate this cultural framing every day. Nike's Russian campaign had a specific cultural text to invert.

## Mechanic
A film rewriting the traditional Russian "What Are Girls Made Of?" nursery rhyme — replacing the sugar-and-spice answer with the actual stuff of female athletes: sweat, determination, blood, sacrifice, muscle. Specifically Russian cultural reference, universally legible insight.

## Why it worked
P13 (truth-telling) with a specific cultural target: not "girls can be athletes" in the generic global sense, but "the Russian story about girls is wrong." The nursery rhyme gives the campaign a specific text to argue with — which is always more powerful than arguing with a general attitude. The inversion is precise: same structure, opposite content.

## Steal
Find the specific cultural text — a nursery rhyme, a proverb, a saying — that encodes the attitude you're fighting. Invert the text exactly rather than making a general counter-argument. The precision of the target makes the response more powerful.

## Related
- Pattern: [[../MOC-pattern.md#p16]]
- Sibling: [[apple-1984-1984.md|1984]]
- Sibling: [[apple-think-different-1997.md|Think Different]]
- Emotion match: [[apple-1984-1984.md|1984]]

---

*Author: Serge Shima ([t.me/aimastersme](https://t.me/aimastersme) · [sergeshima.com](https://sergeshima.com) · [aimasters.me](https://aimasters.me)) · License: CC BY 4.0 — attribution required · Source: [smixs/creative-director-skill](https://github.com/smixs/creative-director-skill)*