Playing the Lottery
Gloria James (LeBron James Family Foundation), Mike Dyrsch (Half-Court Hero), Savannah James (LeBron James Family Foundation), Mike Pietsch (Carmex), and Frank Sanchez (Boys and Girls Clubs of America)
Photo Credit - Michael Kraabel
This post was originally published on the Bolin Marketing blog on March 8th, 2013 and updated and reposted on January 28th, 2018 on LinkedIn.
After posting about the 5-year anniversary of this crazy experience managing the Half-Court Hero promotion, I dug up this post and it's still quite relevant so I thought I would repost it here on LinkedIn to share.
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It’s what a marketer stays up late dreaming about at night.
Something they work on for a client going “viral” on the internet.
You can try to plan for it by producing great, engaging content and distributing it on the right channels with the help of the right influencers, but you still need a whole lot of luck. Based on the huge amount of content produced for brands these days, the odds of that content going “viral” are probably 1 in 100 million.
To make it an even harder feat to accomplish, the definition of “virality” is itself a moving target. 100,000 views, contest entries, or website visits used to be a pretty big number when it came to online content, especially when that content is branded.
Nowadays if that number isn’t in the millions or 10s of millions it is only a “mild” success.
“Unless you’re Paris Hilton, no video is guaranteed to go viral. A guide for creating a successful viral campaign is as effective as a tutorial on how to win the lottery. OK, you’ll learn the basics like ‘you don’t win if you don’t play,’ but that’s about it. Viral work is, for the most part, unpredictable.” Christian Haas / Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
At Bolin, we aim to produce content that inspires and empowers consumers, which is why we were so excited by our recent opportunity to implement this philosophy of producing engaging content while “playing the lottery” for our client, Carmex.
As part of Carmex’s partnership with LeBronJames.com and their Half-Court Hero promotion, we set out to create content that would specifically resonate with both Carmex users and LeBron James fans alike.
The resulting short series of “mockumentary” webisodes, The Carmex Half-Court Academy, featured comedic advice on how to dress, prepare, make, and celebrate basketball’s iconic half-court shot. (2018 Note - Did anyone catch the NFL recently creating a *very similar* character as our Half-Court Jackson? Check this out and compare.)
The goal was to cultivate interest in the promotion and the forthcoming grand prize half-court shot, which was worth $75,000.
Over 86,000 total series views later, and our cost for the entire series is under the $1.00 cost per view mark.
We’re enjoying the added benefit of these videos being evergreen, in that we could use them again should we so choose—not to mention, the wonderful thing about the internet is that people will continue to stumble upon these videos long after their novelty has worn off. (2018 Note - these videos are now at 400k views 5 years later!)
In addition to the videos, we took the calculated risk to advise Carmex to sponsor the Miami Heat so that the grand prize shot could take place during a Miami Heat home game.
The strategy here was that the shot, while only lasting 2-3 seconds, would be much more exciting, regardless of the result, if it were taken in front of 20,000 cheering fans as opposed to a rented gym with 5-10 onlookers. And that’s when this happened:
While never in a million years would we have expected Michael Drysch to hit that shot, it would have been still another million before we’d expect it to be a hook shot of all things and for LeBron James himself to run out and celebrate the way he did.
Within minutes of the shot going in, we were on our way to 15 million+ views of the shot, and we had ourselves a full-blown viral video. (2018 Note - The NBA's highlight of the shot is the most watched NBA clip on YouTube all-time, with 39 million views and counting!)
On top of that, Michael had dozens of interview requests flooding his voicemail that he needed our help managing.
96 hours, a trip to New York City to have Michael appear on 7 nationally syndicated TV shows, including appearances on ABC’s Good Morning America, Fox and Friends, and CNN, and $4 million worth of TV brand impressions later, and we had officially helped Carmex win the viral video lottery. (2018 Note - Here's a great write-up from Jeff Arnold about the trip)
All it took was an insane amount of luck and an unexpected assist from the best player in the NBA.
