The LeBron Etch-A-Sketch Video - A Slam Dunk!
The Cleveland Cavaliers, a sister company of Quicken Loans, commissioned a professional Etch-A-Sketch illustration of LeBron James from Etch-A-Sketch artist George Vlosich. Vlosich video taped the entire five-hour process. From that source video, they created a five-and-a-half-minute video with prominent Quicken Loans/Cavaliers imagery and uploaded it to YouTube. The Quicken Loans Marketing team stepped in to promote the video and foster passing it along to others.
The problem? At over five minutes, the video was too long. Also, for the entire length of the video, a relatively large Quicken Loans logo appeared in the lower left corner, blocking George's left hand. We shortened the video to three minutes and the Quicken Loans logo was removed. A final screen was added at the end of the video that stated, "Presented by Quicken Loans and the Cleveland Cavaliers." Here is the final video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=nYM__s3R5q0.
The longer video was replaced on YouTube with the updated version, and we launched a targeted blogger outreach. We contacted 28 blogs that featured NBA basketball (specifically the Cleveland Cavaliers), Cleveland area information, and some Technorati Top 100 blogs. The results came quickly. ESPN, the LA Times, Fark, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Make: Blog, Digg (frontpage), Adrants, College Humor, Advertising Age, Crunch Gear, Sports Illustrated, Cleveland.com, AOL.com, Cavs.com, WKYC.com and Wordpress.com all mentioned the video. Eventually, over 300 blogs mentioned, embedded, or linked to it. TV station WKYC ran a prime time news story.
At its height, the video garnered over 35,000 views an hour. This wasn't an anomaly, and the unusually high traffic attracted the attention of YouTube's editors. They made it a top pick for "Sports" and gave it a home page feature.
To date, almost 1.7 million views are totaled on YouTube. Not one cent was spent advertising or promoting the video.
Credit Information
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Client: Cleveland Cavaliers/Quicken Loans
Agency: N/A
Budget: All work done in house
Date of Campaign: June 2007
Case Study URL: http://youtube.com/watch?v=nYM__s3R5q0