The Campaign

We set out leverage the passion and spirit of HBL players to fuel the high-school basketball movement in China. If you’re in the HBL you get to experience playing basketball at a level that most kids can only dream of - the epic stage, the intense competition, the passionate fans and bragging rights of being the nation's best. Our creative idea was to give everyone else a taste of this, so they could share in the excitement and be inspired by it - especially future players. Our idea was to create a mobile experience that gives an ultra-authentic taste of the HBL lifestyle, allowing fans to live their own HBL journey.

Creative Execution

To scale the spirit of HBL and fuel a national basketball movement, we created a digital first-hand experience of it that could be customised and shared. Graphic novel-style animations of pivotal HBL moments - first training, locker room banter, fan support, a live game and the thrill of winning - can be pieced together in over 700 combinations and personalised with the addition of name, jersey colour, player number and more. The experience was shared across Social platforms such as Wechat and Weibo and through printed QR codes on merchandise during the games. This experience was launched on April 17th 2018 the day the national finals was announced and ran during the 2 weeks leading up to the grand final on April 30th.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

A socially driven execution the experience reached over 12 million netizens with the help of celebrities like Bai Jin Ting, Wang Zhe Lin, Fang Shuo, Zhao Rui, and Kobe himself who all shared their own posters on their weibo accounts. Over 75k Unique users within 14 days, Over 400k page views, with averages of 3 minutes of engagement time. Bounce rate is around 40% overall and more than half of the users played till the very end of the experience. And more than 15% of the traffic came from the QR codes located on posters designed by basketball fans.