Nike can't stop making woke campaigns — but this might finally wake it up

After years of woke ads and progressive positioning, the fun may be over for Nike.

An announcement on Monday morning is not only likely to hurt the company's image, but it also serves as an indicator of massive financial woes.

Nike's market cap has fallen from $264 billion in November 2021 to $52.7 billion.

Nearly two decades after being recognized as one of the premier blue-chip companies in the United States, Nike will have to say goodbye to the higher echelons of the financial market.

After 18 years, Nike has officially been dropped by the S&P 100, the index that typically represents the most established, investible, and financially reliable businesses there are.

The swoosh checkmark just isn't cutting it anymore, it seems. Nike's market cap has fallen from $264 billion in November 2021 to $52.7 billion in September, according to Fox News, its weakest valuation in 12 years.

Shares in Nike are also down 43% this year, but that's not to say the S&P 100 has struggled. In fact, S&P Global notes the S&P 100 is up nearly 13% year-to-date and 16.55% in the last year. While Nike has tanked massively in the last five years, the S&P 100 has increased 14.15% over the same time period.

Signs that Nike would be dropped from the index led to severe backlash from many who believe that the company's woke advertising in recent years is to blame, as Blaze News recently reported.

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The brand recently saw the exodus of two worldwide soccer stars to competitors, including Kylian Mbappe to On and Lamine Yamal to Adidas.

A series of controversial ad campaigns may also have turned off its audience.

Perhaps the most infamous Nike campaign featured former NFL quarterback and national anthem kneeler Colin Kaepernick in 2018.

In 2023, actor Dylan Mulvaney — known for pretending to be a young girl — made social media posts marketing women's sports bras and leggings as a paid promotion for Nike.

In 2025, the brand tapped female athletes like Caitlin Clark for a campaign about how women have been silenced and oppressed simply for being women.

"You can't take credit. You can't speak up. You can't be so ambitious. You can't break records. You can't have any fun. You can't make demands. You can't keep score. You can't stand out," the copy read.

This was followed by a blunder at the Boston Marathon in April, where Nike was rightly or wrongly raked over the coals for an ad that read, "Runners Welcome. Walkers Tolerated."

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Some attempts to right the ship have been made — see its family-friendly golf spot — but overall there has been an obvious problem at the company.

Jim Osman, a financial expert at Forbes, stated that Nike did not become weaker because the S&P decided to remove it, but rather the S&P was late to the party in noticing the company's financial issues.

"Customers moved first. Competitors gained ground. Nike relied too heavily on familiar franchises, pushed too far toward direct-to-consumer, weakened some wholesale relationships, and then had to spend time repairing them," Osman wrote.

He added that the numbers eventually caught up with the company, while full-price demand weakened at the same time.

The S&P 100 represents nearly 71% of the broader index of the S&P 500 and selects large companies across different industries to provide broad representation of the U.S. stock market. Nike remains in the S&P 500.

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