Filmmaker Spends Nike Ad Budget on a Trip Around the World

Filmmaker Casey Neistat (whose peanut butter jar lens fix we featured recently) was recently commissioned by Nike to create an advertisement for its new FuelBand.

Instead of spending it on a standard ad, he decided to “go rogue” and spend the money traveling around the world with his friend Max. They captured video of themselves traveling 34,000 miles across three continents, 13 countries, and 16 cities over a span of 10 days. Neistat states,

We only packed backpacks—they were big backpacks, but one of the rules was we had to have both hands free at all times. That meant no duffels and no rolling bags. We only had underwear and socks, because we each had two cameras, chargers, extra batteries, laptops, and hard drives. That’s the bare minimum, and that takes up a lot of space. We had total redundancy, because if one of us were kidnapped, and never seen again, we had to make sure we could still make the movie.

The resulting video they made has gone viral and will probably reach many more people than a traditional advertisement would have.