MUSE Platinum

2018

Dear Basketball Digital Campaign

Entrant Company

Rogers & Cowan

Category

Strategic Programs - Digital Marketing Campaign

Client's Name

Verizon

Country / Region

United States

The Rogers & Cowan Digital team successfully managed one of the toughest Oscar races for Best Animated Short Film with our “Dear Basketball” Digital Marketing campaign. We were tasked with creating a massive campaign for the animated short film by NBA icon Kobe Bryant. Legendary animator Glen Keane and world-renowned composer John Williams crafted the picture to highlight Bryant’s childhood dreams, NBA career success and farewell letter to the game. To build an emotional connection with its viewers, the 2018 Academy Award and Annie Award winning campaign was heavily centered around outreach through website, email, digital screeners and advertising components. While overcoming challenges, “Dear Basketball” achieved remarkable success across the board, generating interest and excitement for the film, all while producing outstanding performance metrics.
To execute a successful campaign, Rogers & Cowan Digital crafted a momentous digital marketing strategy that best catered to the films audience. Promotion included the distribution of DVD screeners and emails blasts, allocation of eye-catching social media content across various social platforms, implementation of a supplemental “Dear Basketball” website and supporting media buy for proprietary advertising technology. DVD screeners were dispersed to the entire Animation and Short Films branch of the Academy, which includes over 500 members, and email blasts were emitted to members of the animation branch. This concept gave R&C Digital leverage in driving digital views. In addition to mailers and email blasts, we created social content (imagery, gifs, snippets from the film, etc.) to provide an emotional connection between the viewer and the short film, while teasing “Dear Basketball’s” winter release. To build passion and an emotional connection behind the film, we generated social assets, which consisted of BTS and EPK video content centered around Glen Keane. This drove greater promotion to our campaign and resulted in celebrities, teams and influencers such as the Los Angeles Dodgers, Magic Johnson and Vale Genta reposting “Dear Basketball” content. All, including a number of posting-participants not mentioned, played an extensive role in viewer engagement and reposting became our friend.
In support of “Dear Basketball’s” short film advertising, our team utilized proprietary advertising technology, targeting academy voters and ASIFA members. We placed advertisements and isolated the audience into targeting pools which, in-turn, guaranteed real people in our target audiences while eliminating ad-stacking, fraud, click-farms and fake accounts. We also boosted Facebook posts published on “Dear Basketball’s” Facebook channel directly to members of our target pools. Lastly, to hone our audience in on the “Dear Basketball” website, we directed our email-engaged audience toward the award-focused website to better exemplify the short film’s story. This assisted our campaign with further exudation into “Dear Basketball,” projecting passion, aspiration and inspiration into its remarkable story.
Results:
As a result of this extraordinary campaign, there were 17M unique engagements, 4.9B impressions, and 63K+ posts using the #DearBasketball hashtag. Kobe’s posts using #DearBasketball racked up nearly 485K engagements and 131M impressions during the two days following the ceremony and premiere. The Verizon influencers attained hundreds of thousands of engagements and thousands of link clicks. The Instagram influencers contributed hundreds of thousands of engagements, 50K+ link clicks, 22K views, and 17K monthly active users. The LA sports teams and influencers contributed nearly 50K link clicks, 23K views, and 17K monthly active users. As a result, the “Dear Basketball” campaign successfully performed, reflecting a significant turnout in engagement and overall performance metrics.

Credits

Craig Greiwe
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