Best Sports Rich Media Online Campaign

To increase viewership of the many college football games airing each week, ESPN needed an advertising campaign that could seamlessly promote multiple game times, teams and networks. The online campaign aimed to engage sports fans with broadcast-quality creative, drive traffic to ESPN.com, and position the network as the premier destination for college football—both on TV and the web.

We built a dynamic system that generates custom 3D ads on the fly along with a client-facing control interface. The system allowed ESPN to release multiple ads each week with different 3D animations, teams, rankings, conferences, copy, game times, networks, and sponsors almost instantly. Over the course of the season, ESPN was able to promote more than 100 games.

The campaign displayed 1.4 billion impressions nationally across sports, news and entertainment websites. A strong presence on these sites helped ESPN become the #1 network (broadcast or cable) among key male demos on all four BCS nights.

The Capital One Bowl Week units, (which contributed to ESPN’s highest rated broadcast day ever on January 2nd), include a full, interactive schedule within the ad space on rollover.

The BCS National Championship ads allowed fans to vote and share their opinions on Facebook and Twitter. The National Championship campaign generated over 286,000 votes and capitalized on social media to broaden its reach, helping to deliver the 2nd largest audience in cable TV history.

Contributors:

RED INTERACTIVE AGENCY

Location: USA

About the Agency:

RED is a full-service digital agency. We are comprised of experienced strategists, creatives, technologists, designers, marketers, storytellers, and inventors. And together we form a passionate collective dedicated to creating the most meaningful and effective digital solutions for progressive brands. We consistently deliver results for our clients by first gaining a deep understanding of their needs and target market, and then combining insight-driven strategy & ideation with the highest levels of execution. Ultimately, we find gaps in the marketplace and bring our unique brand of innovation to the digital landscape.