Why ad deal with Colin Kaepernick is not a big gamble for Nike

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TODAY:

• Controversy sells ...that's the bet Nike is laying in making former NFL quarterback ColinKaepernickthe centrepiece of its30thanniversary "Just Do It" campaign
• Why your next job interview may be with amachine
• Brazil loses 'natural treasure' as museum fire destroys 20 million artifacts
• Missed The National last night? Watch it here

Nike's Kaepernick play

Controversy sells.

At least that's the bet Nike is laying in making former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick the centrepiece of its 30th anniversary "Just Do It" campaign.

The ex-San Francisco 49ers pivot has been without a job since March 2017, when he became a free agent. He hasn't played since September 2016, a few weeks after he started taking a knee during the U.S. national anthem in silent protest against police killings of African-American men.

The protests, which quickly spread across the league, involved both black and white players. They have been bad news for the NFL, since part of its fan base endorses the action, and a perhaps even bigger segment finds the kneeling offensive and unpatriotic.

It has also become a hot political issue. Donald Trump has repeatedly taken to Twitter to demand that team owners "fire or suspend" players who take part.

An NBC News/Wall St. Journal poll released this past weekend found that 54 per cent of respondents were against the protest, while 43 per cent think they're appropriate but the divide is much starker when you break out the feelings of Republicans versus Democrats, or African-Americans versus whites.

As the debate raged last season, there were counterprotests and fan boycotts. And Nike saw its shares dip in early trading today, following a couple of days of people posting images of burning running shoes and mutilated shorts on the internet.

It seems like a bold gamble to put Kaepernick's face on TV and billboards, along with the message "Believe in Something. Even if it means sacrificing everything." Especially since Nike recently extended its deal to have its trademark swoosh prominently displayed on the uniforms of all 32 NFL teams through 2028 spending well over $1 billion US for the right.

But the bottom line suggests that the positives outweigh the negatives for the shoe company.

Nike has surely had more free publicity over the last 36 hours than it has enjoyed over the past 36 months.

It's also big and rich enough to withstand any blowback from the league, with estimated global revenue of $36.4 billion this year and so much cash on hand that it just announced a new four-year, $15 billion share-buy-back program, on the heels of an about-to-be-completed $12 billion one.

Besides, reports suggest that rival sportswear brands Puma and Adidas were both vying to sign Kaepernick to sponsorship deals if Nike didn't renew its existing arrangement with the quarterback.

And while some team owners might not like such a key sponsor appearing to side against them, they can hardly argue that the anthem debacle has been bad for business.

Last year, the NFL made a record $14 billion in revenue, with TV ads rates climbing despite declining viewership. And its three-dozen sponsorship deals covering everything from soup to peanuts brought in $1.32 billion for the season.

When Papa John's decided to terminate the agreement making it the official pizza of the NFL, because its then-CEO thought the protests were hurting business, the league didn't feel any pain. Just this morning, Pizza Hut was named as the replacement pie, in a deal worth hundreds of millions.

In fact, there's really no reason to think that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell won't meet his audacious goal of growing league revenue to $25 billion by 2027.

In an increasingly fragmented television universe, fans still flop onto the couch in great numbers to watch NFL games on Sunday afternoons, and Monday and Thursday nights. That's why the league will earn more than $15 billion in broadcast and streaming rights under its current deals. And why 30-second ads during last January's Super Bowl were selling for $5 million each.

What the league does need to worry about, however, is that its problem with Kaepernick now extends far beyond his status as a media martyr.

Just last week, the NFL lost its bid to dismiss the quarterback's complaint that the owners are colluding to keep him off the field. Which sets up an arbitration hearing later this season in which Kaepernick's lawyers will be able to demand all sorts of potentially embarrassing documents and witness testimony.

It's the kind of David vs. Goliath scenario that might sell lots of sneakers, and cause an incalculable amount of bad publicity for the league.

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Your next job interview may be with a machine

The National's Anand Ram has been looking into how artificial intelligence, or AI, could help companies level the playing field when it comes to evaluating job candidates:

It's 12 letters long and means "he who holds the moon atop his head" in Sanskrit.

"Chandrasekar," I'm told, was my dad's hospital room idea. It's my name, and though I carry it always, it mostly comes out at the bank, the hospital or on my taxes.

Among the litany of reasons why I go by Anand a nickname the comfort of prospective employers isn't at the top of the list. But names like mine are at the heart of a serious, silent issue that affects millions of Canadians: Getting a job.

Last year, Canadian researchers re-examined the findings of a large-scale employment audit, focusing on name-based discrimination. More than 12,000 resumes were sent to 3,225 job postings in Toronto and Montreal.

They found Asian names were 28 per cent less likely to get a callback than Anglo-Canadian names with equivalent qualifications.

Foreign as opposed to Canadian education and experience made it worse:

• An Asian name with foreign education but Canadian experience was 29.7 per cent less likely to get a callback from a job application.
• With foreign education and both Canadian and foreign experience, 46.1 per cent less likely.
• Having only foreign qualifications across the board ranked worst 62.5 per cent less likely to get a callback.

Put another way, Greg Johnson has a greater chance of getting in the door and making an impression on a potential employer in Canada than Ali Saeed or Xuiying Zhang (all names used in the study).

Faced with this problem and spotting a growing trend in corporate unconscious-bias training the tech world is sending its shiniest weapon to help in the battle to make hiring fairer: artificial intelligence.

Take Knockri, a Canadian startup in Toronto. It screens video applications using AI, analyzing expression, tone, voice and speech patterns and comparing them to correlations determined with input from an industrial occupational psychologist. That becomes a score based on attributes like empathy and collaboration and that score is all employers see when they're deciding who to interview.

Using technology to make better hiring decisions

6 years ago

Duration 0:42

Knockri CEO Jahanzaib Ansari describes how his own difficulties help inform his company's algorithms so that differently-abled people aren't kept from the jobs they want.

Knockri says it shortlists 17 per cent more candidates of colour and 6 per cent more women, reducing bias while also saving companies time and money in the screening process.

But as technology reporter Matthew Braga and I explore on The National tonight, the allure of efficiency coupled with a seemingly magic bullet against bias is risky.

How these algorithms are built and who builds them could decide whether a mistake, as one expert put it, gets replicated a million billion times. And they could still end up filtering out a Chandrasekar from the candidate pool.

Still, I'm glad my appa gave me that name. As one Canadian put it to me about his own long, Tamil name: it gives us something to talk about.

• WATCH: Anand Ram and Matthew Braga's story about AI and hiring tonight on The National on CBC television and streamed online
• READ: Anand Ram and Matthew Braga's feature about AI being used to shortlist job candidates

Museum disaster

The aerial photos tell the story.

The missing roof, scorched interior walls and collapsed floors speak of the almost total destruction of Brazil's National Museum in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday.

The 200-year-old building originally built as a palace for Portugal's royal family was home to 20 million artifacts, including the oldest female skull ever found in the Americas, priceless Roman frescos, Egyptian mummies and the complete skeleton of a Maxakalisauru, a long-necked dinosaur that was native to the ancient Brazilian rainforests.

Experts fear that most of the specimens were destroyed or damaged beyond repair in the fierce blaze.

And if that's the case, it's an all-too-common type of cultural loss.

New Delhi's Museum of Natural History lost most of its collection in a spectacular fire in April 2016, including dinosaurs, bird eggs, and stuffed wildcats.

And this past June, the Glasgow School of Art, a Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed architectural masterpiece, burned for the second time in four years, undoing a 35 million restoration that was supposed to be completed this winter.

Canada has seen more than its share of devastating museum blazes.

A stubborn 1990 fire at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina caused $2 million in soot and smoke damage.

A February 1993 fire at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton caused $3 million in damage and destroyed five historic planes.

And just this past June, a fire at the Green Gables Post Office in Cavendish, PEI, caused extensive damage, 21 years after an electrical blaze almost destroyed the iconic farmhouse that was the setting for Lucy Maud Montgomery's tales.

This research paper catalogued 100 fires in museums and art galleries across the country between 1994 and 2004, 11 of which caused more than $100,000 in damage.

The causes were varied. About one-third were due to arson, and another third were attributed to "unsafe practices" like smoking, cooking or open flames. The remainder were caused by mechanical or wiring failures.

The exact cause of the Rio blaze has yet to be determined, but many blame years of government cutbacks, which led to reduced maintenance budgets.

A few words on

A free and driverless ride.

Quote of the moment

"What is this: a production defect or some premeditated actions? We are checking the Earth version. But there is another version that we do not rule out: deliberate interference in space."

- Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia's space agency, on revelations that a pressure leak on the International Space Station was caused by a drill hole, made with a "wavering" hand.

What The National is reading

• Russian warplanes bomb Syria's Idlib (BBC)
• Democrats vow 'sparks will fly' at confirmation hearing for Trump's Supreme Court pick (CBC)
• Myanmar court jails Reuters reporters for seven years in secrets case (Reuters)
• Deadly typhoon hits western Japan, flooding major airport (CBC)
• Director of Russia's anti-doping agency says reinstatement chances are low (Moscow Times)
• Brother of novichok victim says 'it's not looking good' (Sky News)
• 8,000 new antibiotic combinations are surprisingly effective: Study (Science Daily)
• Mattel hopes UN can revamp Thomas the Tank Engine with 'woke' messages (Washington Post)

Today in history

Sept. 4, 1967: Centennial Voyageur Canoe Pageant ends at Expo 67

It was the longest canoe race in history. A gruelling 104-day, 5,283 kilometre competition that started on May 24 in Rocky Mountain House, Alta., and finished on Sept. 4 in Montreal. Some 400,000 people were at the Expo site that day to welcome the modern voyageurs. But as with their forebears, they faced one final hurdle the fearsome Lachine Rapids, just upriver from downtown Montreal.

Centennial Voyageur Canoe Pageant ends at Expo 67

57 years ago

Duration 15:34

Manitoba is the winning team in a grueling 104-day canoe race celebrating Canada's explorers.

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