The Radio City Rockettes, the iconic precision dance company, bring joy to millions through the annual Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall in NYC. 365 days a year, the dance company’s multi-platform digital content spreads a love of dance to audiences worldwide.
The Rockettes “Dance Telephone” video series harnesses the Lo-Fi nature of TikTok and social media's vibrant dance community to showcase the company's relevance in an ever-evolving digital landscape. By producing engaging new dance content, we highlight the Rockettes’ unique precision technique with a fresh twist, attracting a new generation of fans to the legacy dance company.
We challenged ourselves to develop a unique dance series that relied on licensing popular music, which is often the main driver of discoverability with trending dance videos and can be costly. By creating “Dance Telephone”, we incorporated the Rockettes’ precision dance style into a unique version of the classic game telephone. A dancer starts with one move and passes it on to the next dancer, who then adds her own flair to the movement with additional choreography. The cycle continues down the line to the final dancer, who is tasked with remembering the entire sequence of the dance and performing it for the group.
With this original content, we sought to produce an engaging dance video without using popular music while still maintaining viewership and discoverability on TikTok. We also explored strategically leveraging ASMR interest with our tap sounds, to expand interest beyond the dance community.
What began as a standalone “Dance Telephone” clip launched nine additional iterations and is the Rockettes number one performing video series of all time across all of the company’s social channels. To date, the series has earned more than 154M video views, 210M impressions and 5.1M engagements across our digital platforms. The TikTok entry below generated a record-setting 16.3M views and 865K engagements on the platform alone. As a result of this now ubiquitous series, the Rockettes’ TikTok and Instagram handles experienced the highest out-of-season (January – August) growth in followers ever, a 10X increase year over year (153.6K in 2023 vs. 15.5K in 2022). The widespread success of “Dance Telephone” content has been a key driver of record-setting growth for the Rockettes channels outside of the peak holiday season, and highlights the timelessness of this beloved brand, nearly 100 years after the dance company’s inception.
