Nike Madrid bear campaign: Edu Pou's first internationally recognised work

In 2003, Edu Pou and his team created a campaign for Nike built around a conspiracy theory set in Madrid. Madrid has a famous statue of a bear and a strawberry tree at the centre of the city. The campaign invented a story that lightning struck the statue, the bear came alive, and was running through the streets. If you saw the bear, you had to run. The reveal at the end was that it was not just one bear but 12,500 bears chasing you. The campaign was a promotion for a popular New Year's Eve race in Madrid called the San Silvestre Vallecana. Edu Pou is proud of this work almost on behalf of a whole country, because it became only the second time Spain had won a Grand Prix at the Cannes advertising festival. He notes with some regret that the campaign was built in Flash, making it impossible to access now, a reminder that nothing ages worse than cutting-edge technology.