#Allundefeated in 2013: adidas celebrates All Blacks undefeated season with topical social content

 

 

 

Proud to say I drove this idea with my Regional Creative Director partner in Singapore, Grant Hunter 🙂 Idea cracked late on a Thursday, presented to client on a Friday and live late Sunday evening. Awesome effort by our team and the great folk at adidas and the NZRU for championing this piece of social content.

adidas has been a key partner to the world’s greatest team, the New Zealand All Blacks for over 15 years. The 2013 season has been an epic one with the team sweeping all before them, winning 13 games in a row. After the 13th win against England it became a reality that the team could go undefeated if they were to beat Ireland the following Saturday in Dublin. Knowing there would be massive social buzz if the AB’s did beat Ireland, we asked ourselves the question, ‘How could adidas help celebrate the All Blacks first undefeated season in the professional era tapping into the live conversation around the victory’. This was the perfect op to be a partner, not just a sponsor.

 ALL UNDEFEATED IN 2013

 To celebrate the 14 wins, we decided to change the www.allblacks.com URL to wwwwwwwwwwwwww.allblacks.com – with each ‘W’ signifying an All Blacks win. We created both a Facebook timeline cover and social content for the All Blacks Facebook (2.1m fans) and adidas Rugby Facebook (148k fans) pages.   Within minutes of the victory against Ireland on November 23rd,  the new URL was posted on Facebook, Twitter and as a major news story on the All Blacks website generating high levels of engagement and brand love for adidas. 

The idea massively tapped into the international buzz around the All Blacks 14th win. Within 24 hours of posting the idea reached well over 2.2m fans online. We had over 19k visits to the website, over 8k likes and 1,100 shares on the All Blacks and adidas rugby Facebook pages with active social engagement reaching another 180,000 people.  The idea was also retweeted almost 900 times on the All Blacks and adidas UK Twitter pages reaching another 100k people. Zero media spend and an example of creating relevant social content that rode the wave of a topical event, in this case a victory to be proud of. 

Interesting Stats:

– 90% engagement in first 12 hours of posting

-Reached over 2.3m fans in a single day

-Most shared branded content on the All Blacks Facebook page

-Most retweeted brand tweet on @allblacks Twitter page

-Facebook Engagement rate of 14%

 

 

Digital platform overview: Facebook = ‘Who I am’ VS Instagram = ‘How I see the world’

There are many points of view online on the different roles of social platforms to consider when developing your social strategy. Clearly there also hundreds of different social & digital platforms, but I thought i’d share a snapshot on consumer uses of some of the main ones, plus mobile & search. Here’s a quick visual to give you a perspective on some of the consumer uses of the major digital platforms, hopefully helping you define how you’d like to use those social platform to create a meaningful relationship with consumers. This was created/built off some work my great colleagues at Iris NYC (thanks Esty :). The key takeout is to ensure you understand different consumer drivers for use of those channels and employ KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) when engaging in these channels. eg: Facebook is primarily about identity creation for the individual (sharing their life, engaging in conversations which build their real and digital identity) whereas Instagram is really about self expression. Different motivations, different brand uses.