Excellent piece in this months Wired, featuring work by Cooper Smith. Wired Magazine gave Cooper 10,000 London runners worth of Nike+ data (over 6m lines), and asked him to vizualize it.
The results are pretty awesome, as is the rest of Cooper's work!
"In the beginning there was nothing, only an idea"
A beautiful corporate video produced for Asics, wonderfully explaining the innovation behind their running shoes.
I can't imagine Nike ever producing a video like this, the Nike brand is about image, superstars, fashion, and lifestyle.
It's this style of approach from Asics which ensures that authentic running brands such as Brooks, Saucony, and Asics remain the athlete’s choice over fashion/lifestyle brands such as Nike and Adidas.
Amelia Torode rather nicely summed this up on her blog, "I love running, I love Nike's running comms so why will I still not buy Nike running shoes?"
It seems that whilst consumers (and bloggers) choose their lifestyle sports brands primarily based on street and fashion trends, the "ProAm" athletes select their footwear and apparel on comfort, innovation and functionality.