The DEW team was looking for a creative concept for their annual broadcast campaign with the NBA. The challenge? Integrate their product, basketball and their latest national campaign focused on the ultimate DEW and food pairings (e.g. pizza vs. wings, nachos vs. pulled pork).
Union presented four unique concepts and the client landed on “Flavor Slam” – a rich homage to popular sports debate shows. However, in this DEW-branded iteration, the debate over basketball’s greatest match-ups pivots from the likes of Shaq & Kobe or MJ & Pippen, to fired-up debates of the best DEW and food combination.
To bring this project to life, we started the search for what would look like a MTN DEW-branded sports news studio. After touring a few real (and fake) news studios, we determined that the best course of action to make our vision a reality was to create our own. We had limited time and limited budget so we brought on a set designer and put him to work. In the meantime, we started our talent search in hopes to find three comedic actors who fit concepts both visually and energetically.
One of the largest challenges we ended up facing was the creation of the set. In the already limited time period that we had, our set designer was one individual and as we crept up on the shoot date, it was determined that he wouldn’t be able to build the set on his own. The day before the shoot, our team met our set designer at the studio and got to work. We painted, glued and cut set pieces well into the night and pulled it all together in the nick of time looking just as we had imagined.
To ensure the food and product were as appetizing as possible, we brought in a food stylist so the focus of the debate was as appealing to viewers as our on-screen pundits. Our talent delivered their lines with the energy and chemistry we hoped for and once we wrapped on set, it was time to get into the edit. We made a package of custom DEW-branded on-screen graphics that matched the quality of the popular sports news shows we were sending up. We also added in SFX to to bring more dimension and motion to the graphics, creating what would be the background shown on the “TV” screen behind the actors.
The end result was multiple spots that not only fulfilled the brief but drew focused awareness to one of the brand’s biggest digital campaigns.
The client was blown away by the turnaround and quality of execution for such a tight budget. This ended up being a key component to the brand campaign and ran across multiple channels, garnering 50,615 total votes, 140k unique site visits and an opt-in rate of 50% (against a benchmark of < 15%).
