Fast Company June 2015

FOR KEEPING NIKE I N THE SPOTLIGHT 12 Greg Hoffman VICE PRESIDENT OF GLOBAL BRAND CREATIVE AND EXPERIENCE, NIKE Greg Hoffman leads a global team that’s responsible for how consumers experience the Nike brand in ads, store designs, and promotions. Over the past year, he oversaw two of the company’s most ambitious marketing projects to date: a hugely popular series of videos about the 2014 FIFA World Cup and interactive displays related to the 2015 NBA All-Star game in New York. Nike wasn’t an official sponsor at the World Cup, but you released a five-and-a-halfminute animated video, “The Last Game,” that got more than 50 million views during the tournament’s first week. What was your strategy for stealing the spotlight? We spent a year creating “The Last Game.” We wanted one big moment where…

Great technological changes are often the product of a catalyzing event. Wristwatches became a popular accessory in the wake of World War I. Twitter became our planet’s news and notification network after Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed the hobbled US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in January 2009. I flashed back to those events on March 26 this year when I viewed multiple live video streams on my phone of a tragic fire in New York’s East Village, captured with an app called Periscope. It instantly felt like a signal moment. Many technologies have coalesced to enable mobile live video to blossom. High-speed cellular networks envelop the planet. There are more than 1 billion smartphone users. Apps are relatively simple to use. And you can use Twitter and Facebook…

FOR ANSWERING THE CALL 41 Vian Dakhil MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT, IRAQ About an hour before sunrise on August 3, 2014, Vian Dakhil was awoken by her ringing cell phone. As one of two parliament members representing Iraq’s Yazidi minority, she was used to fielding calls from constituents. They complained about electricity shortages, joblessness, and a lack of social services. But they usually called during normal hours. This felt different. The man on the line was frantic. Militants with the Islamic State (known variously as IS, ISIS, and ISIL) had overrun his town near Sinjar, and everyone was fleeing. Yazidis, who practice a pre-Islamic religion, are considered nonbelievers by ISIS and therefore worthy of kidnapping, enslavement, and execution. They had lived in fear for months, but the sudden and vicious invasion had surprised even them.…

FOR LETTING GOODWILL DRIVE THEIR MUSIC BUSINESS 81 | 82 El-P and Killer Mike RUN THE JEWELS Rappers El-P and Killer Mike have each enjoyed long, successful solo careers, but their music really took off when they teamed up under the name Run the Jewels—and decided to give their first album away online for free. The duo released its second album in 2014, the critically lauded Run the Jewels 2. It has now been streamed almost 25 million times on Spotify, sparking sales of concert tickets and merchandise. “Run the Jewels is not a thinking operation; we’ve been a heart operation this whole time,” says El-P. “We believe that we will create a business around goodwill, and goodwill can come from making good, heartfelt music that people enjoy.” FOR HACKING THE SECURITY GAME 83 Craig…

FOR TURNING DETACHMENT INTO DOLLARS 49 | 50 | 51 Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, and Emily Segal COFOUNDERS, K-HOLE Big brands have long hired trend forecasters to help predict where their businesses should go next, paying hefty fees to established firms such as Trendwatching and the Future Laboratory. K-Hole is one of those forward-looking outfits, hired by Coach, Kickstarter, MTV, and other companies to create in-depth reports about cultural currents that will impact their customers in the future. But the five-year-old, New York–based collective is nothing like any other corporate consultancy you’ve ever come across. K-Hole started as an art project designed to comment on the corporate world. Then, through a series of unexpected developments, it gradually turned into another player in the industry it once provoked. K-Hole’s strange journey started in 2010, when…

FOR MAXIMIZING A MOVEMENT 71 Jocelyn Cooper PARTNER, AFROPUNK A 25-year music-industry veteran, Jocelyn Cooper is responsible for discovering neo-soul pioneer D’Angelo (she signed him to her publishing company in 1993) and empowering Cash Money to take Southern rap mainstream (when she was head of Universal A&R). In 2009, she joined fellow music exec Matthew Morgan, cocreator of the black punk documentary Afro-punk, to run the digital platform and annual festival of the same name, which celebrates and encourages risk-taking in music, art, film, and fashion. In the six years since, she’s helped grow the Brooklyn-born summer festival, which has featured performers like Janelle Monáe and Questlove, from 2,500 to 90,000 attendees in multiple cities, secured brand partners such as Nike and Pantene, and negotiated Afropunk’s Atlanta and Paris launches this spring. Afropunk’s programming…