Nike

Phil Knight, the co-founder and former Chief Executive of Nike, prefers to let his superstar athletes and advertisements do his talking for him. Named Advertiser of the Year at the 50th Cannes International Advertising Festival, he is the first person to win the award twice.

Knight has an absolutely clear and commited strategy to use celebrity athlete endorsement. He describes it as one part of the "three-legged stool" which lies behind Nike's phenomenal growth since the early 1980's, with the other two being product design and advertising.

He has built Nike's expansion into sport after sport from its athletics roots on the back of the sporting masters: Carl Lewis on the track, tennis's Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, Tiger Woods, who led Nike into golf, Ronaldo and the Brazilizn national football team, and the basketball star, Michael Jordan, who famously rescued the company.

From the beginning Nike has been prepared to take a gamble on sporting bad boys others wouldn't touch: Andre Agassi springs to mind. It was a strategy that began with Ilie Nastase, the original tennis bad boy. The Romanian had the quality that has come to represent Nike and its advertising: attitude.

After extraordinary growth, Nike became number one trainer manufacturer in the US. But Knight admits the company then lost its way as it failed to cope with its success. It experimented unsuccessfully with expansion into non-athletic shoes, and lost its number one position to Reebok in 1986.

Knight bet the future of the company on a new feature: a new air technology inside the trainer. He launched the product with a David Flincher-directed advertisement which used the Beatles song Revolution, and then marketed the Air Jordan brand on the back of Michael Jordan. Sales took off and the rest is history.

That brings us to the subject of globalisation and the question of how American the brand can be. Nike uses a mix of global ad campaigns such as "good v evil" and local advertising, such as its famous poster campaigns in the UK. During a 21-year partnership with the agency Wieden and Kennedy, Nike has created some of the world's most attention-grabbing advertising: for example, their "good v evil" campaign and two advertisements both for World Cups and the ad tag, last year's Cannes Grand Prix winner. ( Click here to watch this ad) Other famous ads star Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi playing in the streets of Manhattan; Tiger Woods playing "keepy-uppy" with a golf ball (Click here to see the ad) and Brazil's team playing soccer at the airport terminal.

It is a remarkable body of work, both in its variety, daring and consistent originality. At Nike there's a streamlined decision-making process that gives marketing directors real power. They do not rely on market research pre-testing which often reduces the impact of more experimental commercials. There is also the long relationship with one of the world's best ad agencies, and what Wieden describes as "an honesty about sport". Things only happen in Nike's ads that sportsmen and women can really do.

"My number one advertising principle -if I have one - is to wake up the consumer," concludes Knight, with an absolute conviction that is unique among modern-day chief executives. "We have a high-risk strategy on advertising. When it works, it is more interesting. There really is no formula."