- Agency: Someplace
- Client: Foot Locker
- Category: Video Design — Brand
- Location: Santa Monica, California, United States
- Project Brief: Create a brand anthem that celebrates Foot Locker's sneaker legacy through cultural storytelling, iconic footwear, and a dynamic visual journey across generations.
Foot Locker turns 50, and "It Always Will Be Foot Locker" doesn't celebrate that quietly. Someplace and Method Man build a two-minute brand video that the store was never just a retailer. It was the room where sneaker culture kept happening, decade after decade, whether anyone was paying attention or not.
Method Man is the right narrator and he knows exactly what he's doing. The delivery is rhythmic without being a performance, clear without being a voiceover.
He moves through color names, eras, and cultural shorthand the way someone talks who actually lived it — inflections that signal expertise without locking out the person who just likes shoes. That's harder than it sounds. In a 2-minute spot that could easily feel like a history lecture, his cadence is the reason you stay. He's not reading copy. He's recounting.
The script carries the emotional weight. Each colorway is a memory cue. These aren't product descriptions. They're timestamps that are specific enough to trigger something in whoever lived through them, generous enough that everyone else can feel the texture of the era without needing the full reference.
The spot doesn't ask you to know every shoe. It asks you to recognize that people cared about them, deeply, and that Foot Locker was where that caring happened.
The line "but it was always black and white" does something quietly ambitious. On the surface it's the brand's colorway, the referee stripes, the store's visual identity. But it also says something about who sneaker culture belongs to: everyone, across every generation the script just walked through.
It's an inclusive statement that never announces itself as one. It doesn't preach. It just keeps repeating until the weight of 50 years makes the point for it.
And finally, the visual editing matches the narration's rhythm without competing with it. Quick cuts, archival footage, product close-ups, retail floors across decades. Nothing lingers too long.
The pace earns its length. It's two minutes that move fast enough to hold attention but slow enough to let individual moments register. The stripped-back aesthetic keeps the shoes as the subject throughout. The referee uniform shows up as institutional continuity, not costume. The store itself barely needs to be sold.
By the time the line "it always was and always will be Foot Locker" arrives, it doesn't feel like a tagline. It feels like something that's been proven.
