Nike Adds Ice to FuelBand Fire With Limited-Edition Wristband

At the start of the year, the folks at Nike and a few of its star athletes it supports made a very big deal about the new FuelBand, a digital wristband that keeps track of every piece of data you could possibly imagine while you’re working out. Since then, Nike has added the ability to “keep track of the sights they've visited while out for a jog or a bike ride and share said moments / achievements with their mates,” according to Engadget.com.

FuelBand also is getting some love for its latest campaign, while landing Nike and W+K a Grand Prix at the recent Cannes Lions ad festival for its digital efforts to launch and make FuelBand a must-have item. 

Now collectors and fans will be falling over themselves to get their hands on the latest iteration of FuelBand — the limited-edition Ice Fuelband model, shown at top, which Serena Williams debuted at Wimbledon and launches July 27th in London (just in time for Olympics fever), San Francisco and New York at select retail locations, and on Aug. 12th at nikestore.com — marking the first new colorway since the original FuelBand debuted in January.

Williams was part of the FuelBand launch campaign, which has racked up 3 million views just for the video promo on YouTube since January. The FuelBand launch along with its fellow winner, the Swedish Institute/Visit Sweden's "Curators of Sweden" social nation-branding campaign, both show "brands behaving a certain way,” Cannes jury head Iain Tait, the recently appointed executive creative director at Google Creative Lab, said. “They're not about what they say or big noisy messages; they're about what they do — they enable.”

Tait went on to say, Ad Age reports, that FuelBand’s campaign was “a huge, ambitious piece of work that had a lot of research and software development,” but is still “part of people's everyday lives and really changes the relationship people have with Nike as a brand."

Tait and his fellow jurors had been doubtful that they would find anything groundbreaking in the competition but then did notice a significant change. "These two pieces aren't about storytelling. It's about brands behaving in certain ways and embracing consumers,” said one juror.

Cue Nike's new campaign, for its Hyperdunk+ basketball shoe ("Game On, World" starring LeBron James), which reiterates that the Nike brand experience is now one big, connected world that makes sports and working out a digital competition (from #makeitcount to #gameonworld) as much as a physical and mental one: