Baseball is a game about tradition, part of America’s culture and full of personal memories – that is the insight behind Major League Baseball (MLB) sponsor Bank Of America’s #MLBMemoryBank.
This campaign asks baseball lovers to share their favourite memories and celebrate America’s favourite pastime.
It asks ‘Do you remember your first no hitter, bleacher beer, Fenway Frank or Dodger Dog?’ and invites fans to share their experiences through its ‘MLB Memory Bank’.
The initiative has been running through the 2014/15 season, but has ramped up with inventive additional strands during the Playoffs and for the World Series itself.
To celebrate the postseason, late October saw the league’s banking partner brought its innovative #MLBmemorybank Vault to the streets of New York and Los Angeles to help Mets and Dodgers fans recall classic memories and create some great new ones (with the help of an interactive memorabilia machine).
Social media activations, developed in harness with agency Hill Holliday, have also been a major focus of the campaign through the regular season (with fans encouraged to digitally share their own stand-out baseball memories using the campaign hashtag #MLBmemorybank).
This social strand also continued through the Playoffs and into the World Series too.
Our #MLBmemorybank Vault was in Santa Monica, where Eric Karros helped us surprise a fan w/ #WorldSeries tickets. pic.twitter.com/W6WJTTwvbI
— Bank of America (@BankofAmerica) October 9, 2015
Share a baseball memory? ✔️
Unlock our #MLBmemorybank Vault? ✔️
Attend the #WorldSeries? ✔️
New memory made. pic.twitter.com/BHMJs2ZtqM
— Bank of America (@BankofAmerica) October 29, 2015
Bank Of America has also distributed two player-led videos via its social channels during the Playoffs to try capitalise on the uptick of baseball conversation around October.
The bank worked with St Louis legend Ozzie Smith to surprise New York and LA fans and link them too the ‘”Memory Vault’ on-site activation.
A great night surprising @Cardinals fans with selfies. Thanks to @BofA_Community for making it happen! #MLBmemorybank pic.twitter.com/q52rqn4C5i
— Ozzie Smith (@STLWizard) September 9, 2015
Again, those fans who shared their memories were given a four-digit code to the Vault which enabled many of them to unlock unique baseball prizes ranging from signed memorabilia to postseason and World Series tickets.
Not only has the MLB sponsor leveraged the postseason fanfare with increased TV inventory and in-broadcast integration, it has also curated an original Snapchat Stories activation leveraging MLB’s official account all about celebrating memories and helping fans create new ones.
Fans recreated their personal favourite Postseason moments through a series of videos for the ‘Story’ and the initiative closed with a call-t-action directing viewers to screenshot an art frame of World Series tickets and then tweet that along with their favourite baseball memory using #MLBmemorybank for the chance to win postseason tickets.
This innovative idea also builds on the sponsor understand that the property owner struck a deal back in May with Snapchat to contribute video and user-generated baseball content to Snapchat’s ‘Our Stories’ feature in the form of a series of weekly stories called ‘MLB Wednesdays’.
Ensuring that each week Snapchat curates this league and fan submitted content and then pushes it out to Snapchat users – thus establishing a platform audience for the account, the league and its commercial partners.
These Playoff campaign phases continue the MLB sponsor’s season-long baseball memories campaign that was spearheaded by TV spots in June’s ‘Father & Son Opening Day’,
July’s ‘First Pitch’,
August’s ‘Favourite Memories’,
and September’s ‘MLB Memories’.
The campaign’s goal was to showcase fans’ love of baseball in a fun and authentic way by providing sharing platforms and experiences that link the game, the fans and the brand.
‘To do this, we introduced the #MLBmemorybank campaign in partnership with MLB, asking fans to share their favorite baseball memories and helping them create new ones,’ explains Charles Greenstein, SVP and global sponsorship marketing executive at Bank of America.
‘This season we used our MLB assets and rights in a different way. We pivoted from prior CSR marketing efforts (as illustrated by our case studies on BOA’s 2014 World Series campaign and its 2013 veterans initiative) to be more fan-centric,’ Greenstein adds.
Comment
It is innovative, it feels fresh, it is well integrated in terms of platforms and property-relevant events and based on deep insights and a genuine understanding of baseball ’s heritage, tradition and its place in American culture.
We love it!
And that results statistics seem fairly impressive too.
Thus far the #MLBmemorybank initiative has generated an impressive 400m-plus Twitter impressions around #MLBmemorybank and 18,000 specific shared baseball memories.
The results of the Snapchat Story strand also exceeded expectations: the brand itself reports more than 6,000 screenshots, 3,208 Twitter entries and 131,000 Story opens.
During the two day campaign there were 3,660 mentions of #MLBmemorybank on Twitter, representing the largest spike of the season.
Links
Bank Of America YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/bankofamerica
Bank Of America Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/BankofAmerica
Bank Of America Twitter:
Bank Of America Google+:
https://plus.google.com/+BankofAmerica
Bank Of America Website:
https://www.bankofamerica.com/
MLB:
http://mlb.mlb.com/social/sponsored/y2015/memory-bank/
Hill Holliday:
