I've lived in Boston since 2008, and well, it's hard not to be a celtics fan. when i learned that my company was going to sponsor marcus smart i nearly fainted. but there was a catch.
My in-house creative team would have exactly one hour with Marcus Smart to capture enough content to create a comprehensive omni-channel marketing campaign including OTT, paid social channels, and out-of-home. On top of that, and because of the fickle nature of the NBA, we preemptively decided to shoot Marcus both in a Celtics jersey and a plain jersey in the unlikely event he was to leave the Celtics. Wow. I'm really happy we made that decision because mid-way through our launch Marcus was traded and we had to change every asset where he was wearing a Celtics jersey.
"Smart, Not Smart" was my pitch.
For context, Flexcar is a monthly car subscription that's a smarter alternative to car ownership. It's one monthly car payment that includes maintenance and insurance; however, unlike financing or leasing, Flexcar can be cancelled anytime.
With Marcus fortuitously being born with the surname Smart, conceptually it made sense to use this as a mechanism to differentiate Flexcar as a disruptor with "smart" and something outdated such as buying a car as "not smart".
The brilliance of this creative is that we would be able to manage our short window with Marcus with short reads that could be manipulated into any format we could think of including radio and OOH animations.
But perhaps the coolest part of working with Marcus was after the shoot he signed a bit of swag for the team. I then signed the inside of a Flexcar hat and told him, "Now we have each other's autograph." He wore the hat to his next away-game and posted it to his Instagram.
My amazing team: Douglas Sullivan, Copywriter; Ali Eddlem, Art Director;
Ryan Lindner, Motion Design/Editor; Khalen Roye, Designer
