Show Business: Wanna Buy a Revolution?

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Five months ago Nike had some new shoes. All it needed was a way to launch them. First came a tag line: "Revolution in Motion." Then, according to Kevin Brown, Nike's director of corporate communications, "another brain wave struck -- using the Beatles classic Revolution, music that best epitomizes the concept, to help make our point."

The Beatles had never been heard in a commercial before, although Help! was performed by a sound-alike group in a 1985 Lincoln-Mercury spot. Says Kelley Stoutt, an account executive at Wieden & Kennedy, who helped work out the ad campaign: "We never considered sound-alikes. We're baby boomers too. This is our music. In our minds, it was the Beatles or no one." After some ticklish negotiations and two large payments, it was the Beatles singing and playing for Nike-Air shoes. No getting around it: Nike has brought the current craze for rock commercials to a benchmark and made a bit of pop history as well.

John Lennon was using reflexive radicalism to have a little sport when he wrote this song in 1968. He wasn't promoting revolution at the time -- or sportswear at any time. Photographed on jumpy, grainy black-and-white tinted Super 8, edited to look at first like some family-heirloom home movie but in fact adeptly synced to the hard rhythms of the song, the Nike spot rousingly shows several pros (including John McEnroe and Michael Jordan) and lots of gleeful amateurs working themselves into sweaty transports of athletic fulfillment. "We tried to make a kind of radical sports documentary," says Paula Greif, who produced and directed the spot with her partner Peter Kagan. "It's about emotional moments." For nostalgists, Beatles fans or anyone else who takes rock as seriously as, say, Lennon or Paul McCartney, the ad's most emotional moment may be hearing Revolution's ferocious guitars at the service of salesmanship.

Ad people consider the commercial a dazzler and the use of the Beatles a clear coup. "It's an interesting development," comments Stephen Novick, a production director at Grey Advertising, "and a very, very powerful tool." Others express some doubts. John Doig, a creative director at Manhattan's Ogilvy & Mather, remembers the days of anti-Viet Nam demonstrations with "bloody police truncheons coming down and Revolution playing in the background. What that song is saying is a damned sight more important than flogging running shoes." "Music is replete with the meaning of the time," reflects Marshall Blonsky, a professor of semiotics at New York City's New School for Social Research. "Beatles music has to do with revolt, but the fitness game isn't revolutionary, it's conformism. The commercial's an attempt by advertisers to appropriate the missing past."