With memorable shoes come memorable advertisements. Through decades of evolving fashion, some of the most famous footwear brands have released iconic commercials and marketing campaigns that have become ingrained in pop culture.
Whether it’s Steve Madden’s “Big Head Girls” or Run DMC rapping “My Adidas,” there are certain ads that are harder to shake than others. FN looks back at a few of the most iconic shoe advertisements in recent history.
Initially running from 1997-2005, Steve Madden’s “Big Head Girl” ads featured women with digitally altered heads and limbs made to look intentionally disproportionate. The campaign was so famous it was featured in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which Madden said in an interview “is unbelievable if you think about it.” In 2021, a new era of Big Head Girls was ushered in with a campaign starring Normani, Jordan Alexander, Sydney Sweeney, Nessa Barrett and Justine Skye. “We’ll always bring it back,” Madden told FN, “It’s never going away.”
“My Adidas walk through concert doors/And roam all over coliseum floors” — Run DMC took the German footwear giant to new demographics with the 1986 song “My Adidas,” which is known to have strongly influenced the relationship between sneakers and hip-hop. The song led to a partnership with Adidas and a very memorable ad in which the rap hit can be heard. In the commercial, the group members take a dramatic journey to the stage wearing, of course, Adidas.
Another rap song from 1986 makes the list. A commercial for the Converse Weapon brought together NBA stars ranging from Magic Johnson to Larry Bird, as they all dropped bars revealing how the shoe enhanced their play. It was far from the last time that hip-hop intersected with footwear advertising.
Hollywood has also come to influence the shoe industry. The Nike Air Mag began as a fictional creation in “Back to the Future II,” entrancing audiences with its modern high-top design and elusive self-lacing technology. A version of the shoe actually hit the market in 2011, and a star-studded commercial paying homage to “Back to the Future” teased the release. Bill Hader played a Nike employee trying to sell the shoe to Kevin Durant, whose every line of dialogue is a quote from the iconic Robert Zemeckis film. The shoes were part of a fundraising effort for Parkinson’s disease through the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
LeBron James showed off his comedic chops in a Nike commercial that aired at the start of the 2006-2007 NBA season. In the ad, he plays several characters of various ages and dispositions hanging out at a posh swimming pool. Who could forget James gracefully diving into the pool wearing a white suit as “Summer Madness” by Kool and the Gang crescendos?
