Nike Turns London Into a Game Board to Get People Running. Nike has turned the city of London into a game board for a two-week competition called the GRID which the shoe manufacturer hopes will ultimately encourage young people who already jog for exercise to start identifying themselves as "runners.
" The company has broken the city down into its 48 zip codes. Each zip code (or "postal code" as they say in England) has four traditional phone boxes. Players compete by doing runs, which they start by going to one of the phone boxes, dialing a specific number, entering their unique identifier, and then following the instructions they're given, which send them to other phone boxes in the city. The first GRID competition was held back in April, around the time of the London Marathon. In an essay that ran in a British advertising magazine, Graeme Douglas of Wieden+Kennedy, which developed the game, wrote that when Nike approached them with the task of getting young people engaged in running, they didn’t have a specific idea about how to do that. Design Contests.