Nike Hit with Class Action Lawsuit in Washington Over Marketing Emails

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A proposed class action lawsuit claims that Nike’s advertising emails employ false or misleading subject lines, in violation of the Washington Commercial Electronic Mail Act.

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The 14-page lawsuit says that Nike’s marketing emails contain subject lines designed to impart a false urgency or false sense of scarcity for products in order to pressure consumers into making more immediate purchasing decisions.

“This false urgency wastes consumers’ time by enticing them to engage with Nike’s marketing for fear of missing out and chokes consumers’ email inboxes with repeated false notifications that consumers’ time to act is short,” the class action lawsuit summarizes.

For example, the case claims that an email sent by Nike on June 10, 2022 had a subject line that read “2 days only: Save up to 50%,” implying that the purported sale would run for only June 10 and 11 of that year. However, the suit claims that Nike, in fact, had always intended to run the sale advertised in the June 10 email until June 18, 2022.

The complaint lists several more examples of allegedly misleading or fraudulent advertising emails and subject lines from Nike.

The filing charges that Nike’s false email advertising violates Washington’s Commercial Electronic Mail Act (CEMA), a state law that prohibits any commercial email that “[c]ontains false or misleading information in the subject line” from being sent to the email address of a Washington resident.

The lawsuit also argues that Nike knows or has reason to know whether the address to which a given marketing email is being sent belongs to a Washington resident, as the retail giant has access to multiple avenues through which to gather location information.

The class action lawsuit against Nike seeks to represent all Washington citizens in possession of an email address which received a Nike marketing email with one of the following subject lines in the past four years:

• “Cyber Monday is here” (12/1/2024)
• “Only a few hours left” (11/30/2024)
• “Last chance to save an extra 25%” (9/22/2023)
• “Two days left to save” (8/4/2023)
• “THE Ultimate Sale Ends tonight: Save up to 60%” (7/15/2023)
• “Up to 50% off disappears tonight” (8/26/2022)
• “2 days only: Save up to 50%” (6/10/2022)

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