DICK's Sporting Goods challenged Catalyst to develop a social media campaign for the back-to-school retail season with these objectives:
1. Raise awareness and place DICK's Sporting Goods at top-of-mind for back-to-school sporting good needs
2. Create online buzz around the brand
3. Add a socially engaging dimension to the ad campaign developed for TV & online
For TV and digital, our clients developed a creative campaign and content series called "HELLWEEK," which documented one school's grueling week of football practice prior to the season.
To evolve this for social media, we wanted to emotionally evoke and inspire young athletes using multiple platforms to democratize #HELLWEEK, telling stories of schools across America, beyond football and importantly, including women. We embarked on a 30 day trip from Albuquerque, NM to Philadelphia, PA using compelling photography and video to illustrate young athletes preparing for their football, soccer, volleyball and field hockey seasons.
Content was captured and went through real-time post production in our mobile content studio (an RV). Each piece was edited natively to how consumers use each social platform (e.g. :15 second vids for Instagram vs. :06 loops for Vine) then published across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and Pinterest, leveraging best practices for earned reach and engagement.
30 Day Campaign Results:
- Surpassed 40 million organic impressions
- Over 400,000 consumer engagements
- #1 Share of voice amongst competition
- Avg. Engagement Rate 3x brand's previous best campaign
- Top tweet had engagement rate of 46.38%, eclipsing Twitter engagement rate benchmarks by 835%
This is a campaign that deserves to win for the following reasons:
It connected with the target in a real way. HELLWEEK for these young athletes is a mental rollercoster of extreme excitement, angst, exhaustion and jubilance. Our content was true to each and every aspect, from great corner kicks to scuffed knees, cheers to tears, to even some athletes losing their lunch. We intentionally kept the content uncensored (swear words were welcome) and in doing so were able to prove to consumers the brand "gets it."
We convinced our client to take a big risk. We didn't know what was going to happen, yet our clients trusted us with their brand and it provided us with the ability to truly document HELLWEEK Across America without restraint.
Timely and relevant content. We were with the athletes and talking about HELLWEEK at the same time and in the same way the athletes were. Even down to the day parts: in the mornings we were posting morning prayers and warmup drills - in the evenings we were posting sunsets and players walking into the locker room.
Ultimately, we succeeded because the DSG brand used social media how it was meant to be used. As if the brand were a real consumer going through their own HELLWEEK, creating friendships and sharing content of things we all have in common.
