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 customized 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 implementation was done in under 6 weeks. We prototyped the most complex features to identify blockers in the first two weeks and brought the experience to life in the remaining four weeks, incorporating the animations as they were being done (from early sketches to fully completed animations). Delivering a landscape experience on WeChat Android was a challenge. It doesn’t support landscape websites so we had to rotate the canvas 90 degrees. Another challenge was to overlay dynamic content (e.g. names/numbers on jersey) without pre-processing the videos. We worked with the animation house for the elements to be superimposed with dynamic content to be fixed in the animation. The last challenge was to ensure the experience to work across Tmall, Taobao, Weibo and WeChat on iOS and Android. At the end of the experience, the user can generate a poster among 15 variations (based on color chosen for the experience by the user and a poster style at the end). 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.