We Got Now - New Balance | Clapboard Ad Archive

New Balance’s 2022 campaign We Got Now, created with VMLY&R for the sports and fashion market across the United Kingdom and United States, is a masterclass in contemporary brand storytelling that asserts the company’s cultural relevance with confidence and intent. The creative centers on a 60-second film featuring a formidable cross-section of global talent including two-time NBA Champion Kawhi Leonard, Grammy-nominated artist Jack Harlow, singer-songwriter IU, and England football stars Raheem Sterling and Bukayo Saka, encapsulating the brand’s alignment with those reshaping sport and culture at this very moment. Rather than relying on dramatic performance montages or traditional narrative arcs, the campaign compiles a sequence of stylized vignettes that spotlight its ambassadors immersed in their craft—on the field, in the studio, and away from the glare of the spotlight—achieving a compelling blend of aspiration and relatability. The message is clear: New Balance celebrates the passion and joy found in everyday moments of excellence, elevating presence and authenticity as central drivers of modern identity. This insight chimes with a marked shift in consumer appetite, especially among younger and culturally-savvy audiences who lean toward realness over calculated aspiration in both sports and lifestyle communication. Strategically, by integrating faces from basketball, music, and football—and crucially, offering a mix gender and cultural backgrounds—the campaign’s casting achieves a polyphonic resonance, ensuring both broad reach and nuanced relevance that reflects the brand’s role at the confluence of global sport and creative culture. The film’s tight pacing and understated visual tone bypass the maximalism typical of competitor efforts, favoring moments of relaxed self-expression and creative process that reinforce New Balance’s identity as a brand less about bombast and more about meaningful engagement with the now. Amassing more than 66 million views, the campaign’s impact spans not only athletic consumers but style-driven audiences, underscoring the brand’s ambition to compete with global heavyweights in defining what’s next in both performance and aesthetics. What Clapboard’s taxonomy would classify as FORMAT#8—Ongoing Characters or Celebrities—the creative device here cements immediate recognition and deepens brand recall, using its talent not simply as endorser props but as active agents composing a genuine portrait of contemporary excellence. The campaign earns 72/100 in Clapboard’s global creative archive. In pushing authenticity and cross-cultural resonance to the fore, New Balance signals a playbook for sportswear brands seeking to matter not just when the lights are brightest, but in the everyday moments that shape culture now.