Jordan Brand: Needles

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the JORDAN Brand entering China. JORDAN has grown massively since then and more people wear JORDAN than ever, perhaps never understanding the true spirit behind the brand. JORDAN stands for never admitting defeat, for breaking the rules and ultimately always aiming higher. In the past 25 years, this spirit has transcended basketball and spread into other facets of culture. To remind China of this spirit, JORDAN teamed up with W+K Shanghai and developed the brand campaign, “Different Courts, Same Drive.” The campaign celebrates the brand’s spirit through a series of stories about the famous faces who share Michael Jordan’s insatiable hunger for greatness, to inspire everyone to find their own JORDAN spirit and aim higher no matter what court they play on. To tell those stories in film, Wieden+Kennedy created the “Air Historian,” a central character and key to sharing JORDAN’s history with a fresh perspective. Watch the films here. Played by the famous Chinese Comedian, Tong Monan, and spanning six episodes, the Air Historian series covers a wide range of stories from basketball, to street dance, skateboarding, hip hop, and fashion. Joining Tong Monan is a cast of star-studded characters, including Chinese professional basketball player Guo Ailun, Chinese professional basketball female player Yang Shuyu, MoreFree the Chinese streetballer, Guo Yu the founder of a legendary sneaker shop, Nicky a hip-hop dancer, Xiaohei the Skateboarder, rapper Jony J, and Edison Chen, the founder of CLOT. The Air Historian is the de facto know-it-all for everything JORDAN. He resides in a JORDAN museum slash laboratory and spends his days philosophizing the JORDAN spirit. Every episode is a peek into his mind, where he uses deeply rooted Chinese metaphors, fables, and idioms to draw wild connections, seemingly unrelated at first, but suddenly make sense when aided by interviews that the agency conducted over several months. In parallel, Wieden+Kennedy crafted a series of visuals and animations that expand the 25th-anniversary celebration. The series showcases the famous faces from each episode and introduces the topics that each episode features.