Campaign: #NHL17Pavelski
Objective
In spring 2016, EA Sports decided to run a bracket voting campaign for the next cover athlete of their hockey game, NHL17. Inspired by the upcoming World Cup of Hockey in September, EA Sports picked players from each country that could be voted. Joe Pavelski, the captain of the San Jose Sharks, was the choice for the United States.
Having recently been called up from the minor league team, I was assigned to lead this campaign to try to get Joe Pavelski on the cover through hashtags and a web vote.
Process
Pavelski’s road to the cover was an uphill battle: he was first facing off against Connor McDavid, a Canadian phenom playing in a Canadian market. In addition, Pavelski was a late-round pick playing for a nontraditional team; not exactly a huge star in the league.
Working with the rest of the digital team, I identified several ways to drum up support for Pavelski. Shareable photoshops, videos, “celeb” endorsements, and an always-on hashtag were all circled as ways to increase votes.
Execution
The team immediately got to work building out a variety of creative to use consistently during the voting period. I created some “cover mocks” to share on Twitter, while the video team shot campaign videos that would be played in arena and shared on all digital channels.
We also got some of those “celeb” endorsements that I mentioned - they included Nate Pavelski (Joe’s son), Grandma Pavs (Joe’s grandmother), John Scott (Joe’s former teammate who had gone viral at the All-Star Game the previous year) and E-40 (legendary Bay Area rapper).
In addition, I made the decision to include #NHL17Pavelski - the official vote hashtag - on every single post from the San Jose Sharks account, whether relevant or not.
Finally, with the assistance of the marketing department, we held “Pavelski Power Hours” several time each week. During those, we encouraged fans to post #NHL17Pavelski as many times as possible within the hour for a chance to win a prize. In support, I pre-scheduled a unique post for every five minutes of that hour.
Results
Against all odds and expectations, Joe Pavelski beat Connor McDavid in the first round of voting, and made it to the finals against star Russian winger Vladimir Tarasenko,. In the final, during which time Pavelski and Tarasenko were coincidentally playing each other in the Western Conference Final, Pavelski earned 100K+ more hashtag votes than Tarasenko per CrowdTangle.
Joe Pavelski did not end up being on the cover, reportedly due to more web votes for Tarasenko, but the fact that we were able to get such a high volume of hashtag posts for a non-star was still a huge win.
