Horse With Harden
Foot Locker
Issue 33 | December 2014
Agency
BBDO New York
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officers David Lubars Greg Hahn Executive Creative Directors Chris Beresford-Hill Dan Lucey Art Directors Jesse Snyder James Kuczynski Copywriters Tim Wassler Ryan Lawrence
Production Team
Production Company The Kitchen Director Lawrence Chen Director of Photography Tinx Chan Line Producer Jonathan Hsu Editors Keith Vogelsong Nick Divers Music Company Apollo Studios
Other Credits
Director of Integrated Production David Rolfe Associate Director of Digital Production Joe Croson Lead Producer David Martinez Shot Producer Eric Bloom Associate Producer Courtney Fallow Production Supervisor Michael Gentile Account Team Janelle Van Wonderen Nick Robbins Samuel Henderson Senior Digital Strategist Rhys Hillman Senior Planner Brit Browning
Date
October 2014
Background
James Harden was a basketball player with the Houston Rockets. In 2013 he featured in a successful Foot Locker campaign in which he sang a song so badly it was amazing. The TV commercial had notched up 6 million views on YouTube. Foot Locker wanted to give those loyal fans a more interactive experience with brand ambassador James Harden.
Idea
H-O-R-S-E was a schooldays game when players took turns to make the same shot with a basketball. Whoever missed another person's shot was given a letter. The first person to spell out 'horse' was the loser.
The idea here was to get the entire internet to challenge James Harden to horse over the course of a week. Fans were invited to film themselves shooting crazy and creative shots and submit these through Twitter and Instagram to @footlocker with #horsewithharden.
Harden then tried to replicate the shots, even the incredible trick shots behind the back and over the head which fans had managed to pull off after many attempts.
Every shot he made was filmed and tweeted back out the person who originally submitted the shot.
The live event, on the night of October 1st, was livestreamed for fans to watch. The highlights were edited down into a short online video which was released the next day through Foot Locker's feeds.
Harden managed to match a surprising number of tricky shots and managed to beat the internet in two rounds out of three.
Results
#HorseWithHarden had a potential reach of nearly 61 million people.
Foot Locker's home page nearly doubled its average monthly traffic numbers in the week the campaign was live.
Foot Locker's YouTube subscriber rate increased 300% during the week of the campaign.
There were 3.1 million impressions on Instagram, and 6.5 million impressions from Foot Locker's Twitter account alone.
Our Thoughts
Getting people to shoot, edit and upload video is not as easy as it sounds. One UK competition supported by a £1m TV campaign managed to get just a dozen entries. To get people involved, the idea has to be aimed at the obsessive fan, it has to be involving and it has to be amazing. And this ticks all the boxes. I know nothing about basketball, but this Harden fellow really does know how to lob a ball. Some of the shots are incredible. Tweeting back Harden’s duplicate shot to every individual challenger is key too, I think. Communities are groups of people with names. So Angelo Mendoza’s shot has 25,000 views alone on YouTube – plus a lot of comments that he faked it.
The point being, this campaign created real conversation and real interest by involving the virtual world in a real event.