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Sports-media complex

The sports-media complex is a profit-making machine which Nike owns a huge part of, supplying uniforms to teams and sportwear to star athletes. This creates free advertising for Nike, builds visibility for their zero-waste products, and their swish logo. While resolving past environmental public relations nightmares, Nike has positioned itself within the sports-media complex to dominate its competitive edge. They sponsor top athletes who also lead on social media as ones to follow. Top-paid soccer star, Christiano Rinaldo not only has 82.7 million Twitter, 122 million Facebook, and 203 million Instagram followers, he also “signed with Nike in 2003 and in 2016 signed a lifetime deal valued at $1 billion” (Enoch). Nike sponsors everything from American football, soccer, basketball, athletics, cricket, boxing, CrossFit, figure skating, and much more. All these sports play on a global level, watched worldwide via television. Some events are so large, they dominate channels of broadcasting, such as the Olympics, the Superbowl, and the NBA finals. Nike also sponsors marathons around the world (Nike), local events, such as Skateboarding in London, yoga in Dubai, or sponsor local team’s uniforms, serving athletes everywhere. Nike is a media juggernaut with award-winning ads featuring award-winning athletes, such as Megan Rapinoe’s Never Stop Winning feminist commercial (YouTube) or Colin Kaepernick’s Just Do It, 30th Anniversary Campaign inclusiveness message (YouTube), and now Nike’s sports-media complex is taking on the environment; climate change threatens the athletes who play on the world’s stage as Carissa Moore explains below in Nike’s Sustainability video (Vimeo). Not only has Nike “been named one of 100 most sustainable corporations in the world…ranked third in Corporate Responsibility Officers 100 Best Corporate Citizens list, and named one of the World's Top Sustainable Stocks by Sustainable Business (Epstein), but they are the most recognized logo on the field, pitch, hill, track, and court, and “the dominant company in the industry” (Epstein).

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