Advertising Age published a perspective on the Nike Boston Marathon stumble, presented by a disability community advocate.
The viewpoint inadvertently underscores that confronting cultural cluelessness in Adland is a never-ending marathon.
How Nike’s Boston Marathon ad exposed a gap in disability fluency
By Kelsey Lindell
Last week, a Nike window a few blocks from the Boston Marathon finish line read “Runners welcome. Walkers tolerated.” The ad got pushback from the disability community and running community at large. The brand forgot that it’s completely normal to walk parts of the course, whether that is due to disability, or the fact that 26.2 miles is a very long run.
The company pulled the ad, saying it “missed the mark,” and replaced it with “Boston will always remind you, movement is what matters.” To Nike’s credit, the cleanup was fast and it’s a company that has invested heavily in accessibility in terms of product. But investing in product accessibility didn’t save the brand from a public snafu, or prevent competitors from taking ground with the community that Nike had been building towards for decades.
I wish Nike had considered our “Purple Framework,” which asks people to think about disability inclusion as the color purple: red represents accessibility and blue represents acceptance. Many brands, like Nike, invest heavily in adapting the product, or making sure that experiences are physically accessible. Far fewer invest in understanding disability culture.
Take, for example, NBCUniversal: In 2024, it launched new accessibility features around the same time Shane Gillis hosted “Saturday Night Live.” He used the R word multiple times in his opening monologue. You can create the most accessible products in the world, but if you don’t understand and care about our community, you’ll lose your investment fast. That’s precisely what happened with Nike.
While I’m always cheering for more disabled people to be in full-time creative roles, that’s not enough to solve this. A sign like “Walkers tolerated” doesn’t come from one person. It passes through: a brief, copywriter, strategist, designer, account lead, creative director and client review.
Dozens of people touched this before it hit the window, but none flagged it.
The creative community needs to treat disability fluency as the baseline of creative competency, because it is. Just like I need to understand nuances and best practices so I don’t accidentally create something full of microaggressions around race or gender, the creative community needs to understand the nuances and culture of disability.
Here’s what baseline fluency would have caught on the Nike sign:
How Boston Marathon history shapes disability inclusion
The sign went up about a week before Marathon Monday in a city where, in 2013, a bomb at the finish line produced a generation of amputee runners. Fifty years prior, Bob Hall cajoled the Boston Marathon’s race director into letting him onto the start line and the Boston Athletic Association formalized the wheelchair division in 1977. Boston became the first World Marathon Major to institutionalize wheelchair racing, and more than 1,900 wheelchair athletes have competed there since.
The Boston Marathon has an entire inclusive ecosystem: the Wheelchair Division with its own qualifying standards and prize money, a Para Athletics Division, an Adaptive Program for Runners, a Handcycle Program and Duo Teams. Runners with vision impairments race with up to two guide runners. Para athletes get their own staging areas, their own bus load-ins, their own classification processes.
Why ad copy language matters for disability culture
“Tolerated” isn’t a neutral word in the disability community. It’s the word that sits at the top of every policy fight about disabled people’s right to exist in public space for the last fifty years. Using it casually in ad copy is the disability equivalent of using “blind spot” casually in a DEI conversation. It lands hard because it has history.
Nike wanted competitive pride, but the line they wrote wasn’t rooted in celebration of athletic excellence; it was rooted in exclusion. Meanwhile, Nike is in the middle of a running comeback. The brand has been losing ground in specialty running to Brooks, Hoka, On, New Balance, Asics and Saucony. The “Walkers tolerated” sign didn’t just alienate disabled runners, but anyone beginning to see themselves as an athlete. Those are exactly the customers Nike is trying to win back.
How Nike’s competitors responded to the disability backlash
The brands that moved fastest are also the brands gaining on Nike in specialty. Brands that can read the room on disability and inclusive language now have a real window for cheap, fast, high-resonance moves. Brands that can’t are going to be left in the dust.
Within 72 hours of Nike’s sign going viral, five competitors moved. Asics put up a billboard 1 mile from the finish line outside Fenway Park, reading “Runners. Walkers. All welcome,” Ecco went bigger—billboards across Boston reading “No run intended. Walk your walk,” plus a giveaway of 100 pairs of sneakers to everyday walkers and marathon spectators, and on-route cheering stations for “runners and walkers alike with equal enthusiasm.”
Altra posted on Instagram: “Run. Walk. Crawl. Go where you’re celebrated. Not where you’re tolerated. Good luck to everyone running (or walking) Boston on Monday.” Hoka kept it simple: “No matter what pace, we fly together.” Adidas—the title sponsor of the Boston Marathon, whose spotlight Nike was trying to steal with this guerrilla activation, commented directly on adaptive runner Robyn Michaud’s Instagram post with a single line: “Every pace has a pace.” Five competitors in three days, and four of them don’t even have adaptive product lines. Nike does.
Why brands must treat disability inclusion as a cultural imperative
This is the cleanest case for our Purple Framework I’ve seen: you can invest millions into accessible products and still lose the disability community overnight if your cultural understanding hasn’t kept pace.
The fix isn’t complicated: give your teams enough time and cultural grounding to actually care about what they’re making. I absolutely do not think that any of the creatives on this project sought out to alienate 25% of the population with $13 trillion in spending. Culture moves fast. While we encourage everyone to co-create with the community, the way we prevent cultural faux pas while working at lightning speed is by giving everyone the same frameworks to self-correct.
None of this is rocket science. The frameworks needed to audit are learnable in a day, and we often deliver it to teams in microdosed portions. It’s the same cultural fluency a good creative has always been expected to develop. Disability is only represented in 1% of ads, so while it’s understandable that this is a growth area for most creatives, it begs the question: what are brands doing to fix it?
Strategic inclusion is not just a matter of “being a good person.” The people who worked on this ad are likely all wonderful, kind people who would never want to hurt people with disabilities. But those of us who create content create culture—and we need to treat disability as more than a compliance checkpoint and embrace it for the multifaceted, multidimensional community that it is.
Kelsey Lindell is the founder + CEO of Misfit Media, a disability culture consultancy that helps the world’s greatest storytellers and creative teams get strategic inclusion right.
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