Activating around its athlete ambassador partnership with Golden State Warrior Steph Curry and leveraging spiking NBA interest around the play-offs, Under Armour’s new real-time trivia app starts as soon as the super star shooting guard nailed his first 3-pointer.
Launched to coincide with the NBA play-offs, the first round of ‘Steph IQ’ tipped off last Friday when Curry’s defending champion Golden State took on the New Orleans Pelicans in Game 3 off the conference semi-finals.
This unexpected, app-led live Q&A game, called Steph IQ, was developed in harness with tech partner Red Interactive.
This is a fun, Golden State fan elimination style trivia app revolves around questions focused on the team’s home Bay Area stomping ground.
Questions range from statistics relating to Curry’s rookie season, his epic playoff performances, his sneakers and many more Steph topics.
Playing Under Armour’s hoops trivia game is incentivised through a series of prizes on offer to those who can answer all eight multiple choice questions correctly in the allotted 10-seconds per question.
Winners are in with a chance of splitting the prize pool, plus are netreted in a special raffle draw to scoop gifts that range from the Curry 5 signature shoe and play-off tickets, to Under Armour gear and more.
To promote the game, Under Armour’s strategic plan revolved around Curry’s own personal social channels as well as through the NBA, the Warriors and Foot Locker.
With the key promo asset an explanatory digital and social video.
To play and participate during the play-offs, fans simply need to download the #StephIQ app at StephIQ.com, wait for Steph to hit his first three of the game and then immediately start answering quick fire questions.
To engage the target age demographic – men aged between 13 and 18 – Under Armour chose influencer Bdot to host each game.
Both the sports apparel brand and agency Red Interactive aimed to ensure the design of Steph IQ made it highly shareable among the younger male generation.
“As with any digital experience, if it’s rewarding enough, people tend to share it and invite their friends, especially when there are built-in incentives like free passes and extra lives,” Roni Sebastian, ECD at Red Interactive.
Thus, amongst the incentives, were ‘free passes’ that allowed players to skip one question per game without a penalty for every time they shared the experience across their own social platforms.
“What we are trying to pull off here is very technologically challenging, given that Steph and what he does is often so unexpected,” Sebastian explained.
“We wanted the experience to, in the same way, feel unexpected to the user.”
Comment:
There are an ever increasing number of appointment-based apps, but one of the benefits and challenges of this Under Armour #StephIQ game is that it is triggered not just by a game, but by an act within each game.
Therefore it doesn’t have a set timeframe when fans know they can tune in each day and play.
But it does link to the timeline of the passion it leverages.
This isn’t the first time Under Armour has activated around Curry’s 3-point prowess.
Back in 2015 UA ran an award-winning social media ‘Break The Game’ initiative honouring every three-pointer Curry made during the play-offs with a new three-second film (see case study).
Links:
Under Armour
https://www.underarmour.com/en-us/sports/basketball
http://www.ua.com
http://www.facebook.com/underarmour
http://youtube.com/UnderArmour
https://twitter.com/UnderArmour
#IWILL.
RED Interactive Agency
