“Just do it.”

I know. You’re thinking of Nike’s extraordinary and vast, decades-long campaign. With just my 5 years of working in marketing, this campaign is used so often as the pinnacle of advertising and marketing success. And nobody is wrong. It’s versatile.

Change the intonation just a smidge and you have new meaning. And so it did when Dan Weidan of Weidan+Kennedy co-opted it in the first place.

They were Gary Gilmore’s last words as they sat him down for his execution in 1976, the first execution following a decade of holding back the death penalty. His case being the first to kick the entire…