Wieden+Kennedy and Nike China celebrate Zhou Qi’s draft to NBA with Chinese basketball kids
China is a big basketball country. For many Chinese kids who that grow up playing and watching basketball, NBA is a dream too far to reach. Although there are a lot of excellent basketball players in the country, very few of them made it to the NBA. Other than the one and only Yao Ming, former Houston Rockets Center, Hall of Famer, most Chinese players only had very short careers in the NBA before their return to China. This meant that they couldn’t survive the intensive competition in NBA, a shame for these players and all their fans.
That’s why when 20 year old Zhou Qi was drafted by the Houston Rockets in 2016, the whole country was ignited, again. After a year of preparing and taking the CBA championship after a glorious season, Zhou Qi embarked on his journey to Houston, America and officially started his NBA career, as the only Asian player from mainland China.
While some have said he could be the next Yao Ming, most will acknowledge that Zhou Qi still has a long way to go. But all of the basketball fans have something in common, they don’t want him to come back. They don’t want him to need to come back. They want him to go and get it. They want him to “Want It All”. The spot essentially wrote itself from there.
“We wanted to create something that felt truly authentic to Chinese basketball culture. We wanted it to resonate with fans. And that began by finding an insight into how they were actually talking about Zhou Qi. We then also wanted to show people and places that you don’t typically see in basketball commercials. So we cast people from all over China, not just Shanghai and Beijing. And we filmed in locations that didn’t all immediately scream, “Shanghai,” said Matt Skibiak, Creative Director from Wieden+Kennedy.