THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 8th Annual Shorty Awards

Jordan Brand

Entered in Instagram Presence, Photography and Graphics

Objectives

Create the best branded content while consistently growing engagement and audience size.

All Jordan content must be simple, soulful, fearless, and epic. We set the tone for Jordan Brand on social through our photography, and the best of the best of that content belongs on Instagram. Jordan has a large variety of products, events and stores, all around the globe. We need to tell stories about everything that makes Jordan important, in a way that's relevant for all fans. That starts with the shoes, on the basketball court and on the streets. People have an emotional bond with Jordan that is distinct in the category. Decades of memories are tied to the brand, starting in the mid-80s and continuing on for more than 30 years.

Strategy and Execution

Laundry Service and Jordan both preach authenticity. What does our fan, many of whom are young urban males, post on his Instagram? How does he caption his photos? What does he care about? By answering these questions, we inform our creative process and speak with the consumer, not to him. Jordan is the coolest kid in school. He's the captain of the basketball team, the guy who's front row at the Drake show. The brand is aspirational and inspirational.

Authenticity can mean a lot of things, but it's pretty simple for Jordan. We show our performance basketball shoes on court. Our athletes are the best players in the world, at every level of the game. In game action shots, featuring high school players up to NBA All-Stars wearing the latest Jordan shoes, continue the basketball legacy started by the greatest to ever play the game.

Off the court, the extremely popular re-releases of past Jordan shoes, known as "retros", dominate the sneaker landscape almost every weekend. These are the shoes people camp out for in front of Foot Locker. The only way to properly showcase these products is through beautiful photography in a real-world setting. Our fan wears his sneakers, and he does it in style. We shy away from shooting the shoes off-foot or in a studio setting, because that's not true to how our consumer engages with the product.

Copy also plays a key role on Jordan's Instagram. "Less is more" shapes our approach. Our consumer can say everything with a single word or even a single emoji, something we take to heart. By being efficient with our copy, we stay true to the Jordan mantra. A picture is already worth a thousand words, anyway.

In order to maintain creative consistency year-round, Jordan works with a select stable of world-class photographers. These are the new pioneers of Instagram, influential creatives who are pushing the boundaries of content creation every day. Laundry Service's in-house photographer, Everett Bouwer a.k.a. @illgander, captures the essence of Jordan through his work. He has come to define the singular Jordan creative lens.

Results

Jordan Brand continues to attract new fans across platforms. Our rate of growth on Instagram is impressive, adding over 270k fans monthly. Even more impressive is the consistency we've seen in the past year. It took 112 days to grow from 3 to 4 million followers. Growing from 4 to 5 million followers took 111 days. That is consistency.

For a point of reference, we took a look at how Instagram has grown as a platform. Over the past year, Instagram has grown by 33%, from 300 million users to 400 million users. @Jumpman23 has grown from 1.7 million to 5 million followers during that timeframe (194% growth). To outpace the channel's own growth by 6x underscores not only the quality of our content, but the cultural cachet that this brand holds.

Jordan's engagement rate on Instagram is also impressive. Despite rapid growth, the brand consistently tops 6.5% engagement month to month, with many months going above that benchmark.

On Facebook, Jordan averages more than 30,000 new fans each month, recently topping 8 million worldwide. Twitter attracts between 25,000 and 30,000 new fans each month. Engagement rate is consistently above 5.5% on both channels.

These numbers speak to the fact that Jordan's content is consistently superlative caliber to draw in hundreds of thousands of new fans monthly, and keep those fans engaged with fresh content each day.

Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Laundry Service , Jordan Brand

Links