The Checkdown is a social-driven football-focused digital and social media property focused exclusively on "social news," delivering a steady stream of stories that fans are, or will be, talking about right now.
Leveraging NFL owned social assets and access to NFL Network, Clubs and Players – and relevant conversations around those entities – the property gives a voice to all football-related news (including college, high school and youth football) by curating and creating meaningful, shareable, and sometimes off-beat moments from highlights to uplifting features. The Checkdown translates the game's most chuckle-worthy, heartwarming, inspiring, and epic stories into relevant social features. Our goals are simple:
1. From youth to legends, own all football-related conversations.
2. Broaden the NFL's content offering to engage fans with a focus on helmet-off, positive and entertaining, personality-driven content featuring NFL Players.
3. Transport fans into end zones, sidelines, press conferences, and put them face-to-face with their football idols.
4. Visually and emotionally integrate football and NFL personalities into popular culture – music, technology, lifestyle, and entertainment.
The Checkdown's content embodies what football is all about: uniting communities and celebrating together. Our strategy is to take big swings in content production; never punt, always go for it. We set out to provide a high-volume stream of bite-sized football content on a daily basis for both casual fans and avids: football for all.
The Checkdown developed a block of programming with a focus on creating original, produced and reactionary content. Delivering live updates on every game-day, our stories always break in real-time. We offer value with high-caliber production that flexes the strength of NFL digital rights, NFL.com, NFL Research, NFL Films, and NFL Network broadcasts. With exclusive access to NFL archives, we edit and surface forgotten footage to celebrate the curious history of the game and football legends. This content cycle is supplemented by Live Content Correspondents — social media producers with Samsung devices on the sideline of every game.
To supplement owned content, sourcing the best curated content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit is crucial. As soon as football related news begins to overperform on social, we repackage and publish it with our own flair. The Checkdown monitors local and national media outlets, UGC, and tracks keywords related to all Clubs and Players.
From the beginning of football season until the end of 2017, The Checkdown Instagram account earned 89M video views, 75+M impressions, 8M interactions, 194K follower growth, and an 8.38% engagement rate that crushed top competitor averages (House of Highlights – 3.26%, Bleacher Report – 2.9%, SportsCenter – 1.6%, ESPN – 1.36%).
The Checkdown dominated football coverage on social and set standards for football-themed content on sports accounts. By spotlighting the best cultural moments in the game and outside the lines, our original content and owned footage earned a multitude of shares from top social publishers like House of Highlights, Bleacher Report, and Worldstar, and tons of NFL players and Clubs.
Among other big wins, we designed Madden features into game footage, dug up interesting player backgrounds, created cinematic parodies with NFL stars, treated broadcast footage that took our audience into the huddle with NFL Films' SoundFX, and created viral storms around moments fans missed on the field and on the broadcast.
Most importantly, we gave fans a deeper, more personal level of access to their sports heroes.
