• Back

Champ vs. Legend

In mid-2016, Top Rank Boxing was faced with an interesting, albeit challenging, business opportunity.World-renowned boxer and recently elected senator in the Philippines, Manny Pacquiao, decided to formally end his brief retirement from the ring, agreeing to fight champion Jessie Vargas for the WBO welterweight title on November 5th.

The only issue: HBO, Pacquiao's longtime broadcaster, declined to be involved due to a prior commitment. Knowing that senator Pacquiao was only available for the 5th, legendary fight promoter and Top Rank CEO, Bob Arum, wasn't quite sure what to do.Ultimately, he decided to take a gamble and distribute the pay-per-view event on his own. The fight would go on as planned.As Top Rank's digital agency, our team at VaynerMedia got to work on a plan, building out the storytelling elements around the event. If successful, we would essentially help prove the viability of a new direct-to-consumer pay-per-view model.

There were a lot of great storytelling angles—Senator Pacquiao, Manny's return to the ring, the 11-year age difference, a world title on the line—wrapped up in the fight, so we elected to start there. Both fighters had a passionate fan base we sought to leverage.We assigned branded color schemes and hashtags to each, playing up the #TeamChamp vs. #TeamLegend angle, openly asking fans whose corner they were in. This polarizing content performed so well that it led to other fan-centric creative decisions.

Knowing the intention was for our team to live-tweet the main event and all undercard bouts on fight night, we decided to empower fans to be our "4th judge." Throughout the night, we would tweet polls asking fans who they thought was winning.

Also, because of the inside access Top Rank had to each fighter and team leading up to the event, we proposed capturing and portraying some of these stories in video form, producing a documentary-style miniseries. I wrote all 10 scripts for the series.

The week before the event, I was on the ground of the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, capturing and creating social content from behind the scenes (especially for Snapchat). Our team had access to the red carpet when the fighters first arrived at the hotel, as well as all press conferences, interviews, and closed training events, as well as the much-hyped weigh-in.On fight night, our VaynerMedia team sat ringside at the event, tweeting copy and sharing key visual moments from all twelve rounds of the #PacVargas fight, as well as the undercard bouts that preceded. In the end, Manny Pacquiao reigned supreme.

As for the success of the event, it appeared as though Bob Arum's gamble had really paid off. The fight sold around 300,000 pay-per-view buys, which was on par with the numbers from Manny Pacquiao's last fight, produced and distributed by HBO."So if it did about the same as that fight, why do I need HBO to be involved? Why do I have to pay them a percentage when we can do the same thing on our own?" Arum said. Later, he revealed that Top Rank would continue handling PPV events on its own.

Press mentions:ESPN
The Washington Post
Los Angeles Times

• Next

• Back

Emoji Science

In 2014, GE tasked our team at VaynerMedia with the objective of making science more accessible to millennials through social media. After much deliberation, we decided to harness one of the most basic forms of communication ever invented: emoji.The 'Emoji Table of Experiments' was born.

The idea was fairly simple: Create an 'emoji science' lab in which fans could interact with the brand on social media by sending in their favorite emoji. In exchange, they would receive a corresponding science experiment video in return.We elected to utilize Snapchat (which was hugely popular amongst millennials at the time) to facilitate these engagements, and the star of the show was none other than Bill Nye The Science Guy.

Operating out of an NYU chemistry lab over a 4-day weekend, we got to work bringing this idea to life.I led the charge on Snapchat, since I was the person who ran GE's presence on the platform day-to-day. My responsibilities included building out processes for efficiently capturing, logging, and returning snaps featuring science experiments and emoji, as well as capturing live, behind-the-scenes content and writing social concepts and copy in support of the campaign.The activation was a success, and GE's brand presence was amplified by a Bill Nye video that went viral, receiving over 1.5 million organic views on YouTube and becoming a top trend on Facebook that day (Note: I'm the bearded gentleman in the back left):

The program performed so well that GE decided to turn it into a year-long initiative in 2015. In the process, we helped create an expanded Bill Nye video series, an interactive Tumblr page, and downloadable Emoji Science lesson plans for teachers in partnership with the National Science Foundation.Meanwhile, I crafted concepts for engaging Emoji Science content for GE's social channels, leveraging platform nuances during Breast Cancer Awareness Month in intelligent ways, as well as capitalizing on low-hanging opportunities like Summer Solstice, Star Wars' "May the 4th," and World Emoji Day.

In the end, Emoji Science became some of GE's highest performing social content ever, out-engaging average Facebook and Twitter posts by 40% and earning more than 35 million total impressions throughout 2015.We also drove more than 3.5 million organic video views on the Bill Nye video series, and created GE's most replied tweet in account history during World Emoji Day. The Emoji Science Snapchat geo-filter we created for Summer Solstice was used by over 4.8 million people and totaled more than 63 million views as well.The Emoji Science initiatives we orchestrated led to an estimated 2.4 billion earned media impressions combined, making science accessible to everyone, not just millennials, using one of the simplest forms of communication available today.🔬😍

Press mentions:Fast Company
Business Insider
Digiday
CNET
Tech Times
NY Daily News

• Next