It’s a known fact that the next generation isn’t running home to watch a nightly sports show featuring men in suits sitting behind desks or to finally catch the day’s best highlights. Our goal was to create the ultimate daily series built specifically for this under-35 audience. We wanted to give them the news and updates they care about and on a platform where they spend their time. This is how we created Hot Clock.
A canvas for longform video, IGTV was the perfect place for Hot Clock, our daily round-up series providing updates from across the worlds of sports, entertainment and pop culture. It was important to lean into elements that matter to Overtime as a company, including the use of our exclusive talent, creating something that could be replicated across our additional channels (i.e. Overtime WBB for women’s basketball and Overtime SZN for football), and ensuring the format could lend itself to brand partnerships.
Our strategy when creating Hot Clock was to lean into what we already knew about Instagram and IGTV to test the new daily series. For example, utilizing captions since videos default to an audio-off experience, using vertical video or reformatting to optimize for vertical viewing, starting with something that we know will stop the thumb-scrolling motion and in-feed and capture our audience’s attention.
A key feature of the series is Overtime talent. These are the faces our audience already knows and relates to, making them the perfect hosts to speak to clips, news and events. Hot Clock has also been a great place for us to test out new talent from across the company. Another feature is the broad interpretation of news and culture to match the under-35 audience’s expectations. Episodes feature everything from viral UGC clip with our color commentary to can’t-miss athletic performances to important cultural moments.
Special editions of Hot Clock have been created to lean into one particular topic, such as our Black History Month episode on February 1st or our female empowerment episode on National Girls and Women in Sports Day.
Everything we do with Hot Clock has the under-35 audience at the core.
Hot Clock has resonated with our audience so well that after almost a year, it still continues to go strong. Our audience came to expect that every afternoon, they watch their favorite OT talent break down the latest in the day’s news which they loved to watch and engage with. Each post averaged 442k views with an 18.6% engagement rate, 3x more than 1.5x higher engagement rate compared to our competitive set. It did so well on our main Overtime IG page, we sold it through to a number of top-tier brands in lifestyle, apparel and TV to create custom videos including Nike, HBO, adidas GMR to name a few, incorporating launches and premieres within the Hot Clock video. We also created spinoffs episodes on our WBB (women’s basketball) and SZN (football) channels curating videos that hit on those specific sports/themes.
