Li’l Penny Ads Will Cost Nike Lots Of Dollars Shoe Company’s Super Bowl Pitch Tries To Generate Greater Response

It has all the elements of classic melodrama, right down to the love interest.

Does Li’l Penny finally get the girl?

Tune in on Super Bowl Sunday as Nike unveils its newest ad in the series featuring Li’l Penny, the puppet version of Orlando Magic guard Penny Hardaway.

Nike’s 60-second entry in the Super Bowl ad-orama will be Li’l Penny’s Super Bowl party, attended by many of Nike’s athlete spokesmen, including newcomer Tiger Woods, as well as some celebrities.

Supermodel Tyra Banks, Li’l Penny’s fantasy date, even shows up.

“Tyra is sort of his date,” said Stacy Wall, creative director for Nike’s Portland ad agency, Wieden & Kennedy.

“We hope to achieve the impression that Nike took the day off and had a party, instead of just making another commercial.”

The folks at Nike and Wieden & Kennedy also would like to reverse a string of Super Bowl ads classified as anywhere from only mildly successful to mostly unsuccessful, including last year’s peewee football players.

“You always hope your ads will be popular,” Wall said.

Besides word of mouth, one standard indicator of an ad’s success is USA Today’s Ad Track survey, which classified both last year’s peewee football players and 1995’s 90-second “Stanley’s Speech” by Dennis Hopper as so-so.

“I don’t think that ultimately we are interested in winning that poll,” Wall said. “Ultimately, we just want to be entertaining and capture the imaginations of at least some of the Super Bowl crowd. We got a lot of very positive feedback on those ads.”

Li’l Penny’s Super Bowl party will be shown just once during the game, sometime during the second quarter, costing Nike an estimated $2.4 million just for the air time on Fox’s telecast on Jan. 26.

The commercial was shot in three days in early January in Orlando, Fla., “which is where Li’l Penny lives,” Wall said. “He has a house down the street from Big Penny. They used to live together, but remember Li’l Penny threw a party a while back and trashed his house.”

The shoot involved about 20 of Nike’s athlete spokesmen. Besides Woods, there will be appearances by baseball player Ken Griffey Jr., track stars Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Michael Johnson, football’s Barry Sanders, hockey player Sergei Federov and Big Penny himself.

“Michael Jordan couldn’t make it,” Wall said.

There have been 12 earlier Li’l Penny ads, Wall said, and it just seemed a natural that he throw a Super Bowl party.

“And, of course, it doesn’t hurt that his guests are all of Nike’s premier athletes,” Wall said.