Rocawear Microsite – I Will Not Lose

Microsite and video submission contest
Prior to this campaign, Rocawear traditionally spent most of its ad budget on print campaigns (Vibe, Source, XXL, etc.), however, they wanted to do a large program to focus on overcoming adversity and decided that the digital space was the best medium for it. Since they had little experience in the online space, but knew that BlackPlanet had their audience, they came to us for some help. After many meetings with their marketing department, their creative team, and Jay-Z's manager, we put together a very large program that focused around a microsite that we built. The concept was that users could submit a video about their struggle to persevere and succeed in the face of hardship. We posted some feature videos of celebrities' stories to get the ball rolling (from Ciara to Chris Brown to Caesar, the winner of BlackPlanet's Wired For Battle '06). Users got to submit and vote on their favorites with the top rated videos being sent to Rocawear to select two winners, both of whom were to star in Rocawear’s next ad campaign. The page had downloadable wallpapers, buddy icons, and badges (which users could post on their BlackPlanet and MySpace profiles to drive people to their videos to vote). There was also celebrity integration on television programs to drive buzz, in addition to some radio interviews. When all was said and done, the program had millions of video views and hundreds of thousands of votes. Rocawear was so happy that they reached out to us to begin working on the next one before it even finished!

Verizon DSL

Verizon came to us a bit reluctant. Not reluctant because they didn't want to run with us, but reluctant because they were targeting dial-up users and wanted to do something that would have impact and catch the attention of the users. The dilemma is that most ad executions are very graphic heavy and either take too long to load or don't load at all, and thus would be ineffective. I spoke to our Member Services team about what type of complaints they were getting from dial-up users and the biggest thing was that the ads were making the pages take too long to load for them. It was obvious from there: make very light ads that would load quickly and speak directly to those users. I thought back to the dial-up days of the early 90s. Remember what else was a popular computer activity back then? ASCII art! So I worked with one of the designers directly to create a series of fun ads calling out dial-up users in some interstitial units. The click-thru rates were tremendous for these ads, targeted specifically to dial-up users. Verizon was very happy with the results.

Heineken Premium Light – Member Choice Award

Member Artist Song Competition
Heineken wanted to associate the HPL brand with Music and Entertainment. They reached out to us to put something together that would add value to the community and tie the brand to our audience, so I put together a weekly music contest where we picked a few artists per week to go head-to-head with the winners of each of those weeks going head-to-head for the final week. The winner got a co-branded full-page ad in Vibe Magazine (we had a partnership with them). We ran the whole program in an interstitial unit and generated thousands of votes with the resulting ad (the lower image) going to the winner: K.O.

Heineken DraughtKeg Group

Includes Personality Badges, Songs from members, & Party Tips. This was one of the most fully stocked groups I worked on, so to speak. Heineken wanted to reinforce the house party concept and while many concepts where presented to them, they decided to go with this one. It included a music element (we reached out to up and coming musicians from the community), a viral-esqe component (part personality badges that could be added to profiles and MySpace pages and clicked back to the group), and party tips that included product tie-ins. It was a bit over branded in my opinion, but it is what they wanted and they were happy with the results.

McDonald’s Late Night – Celly Shout Out

Text to wall/banner
Members could text in shout-outs from anywhere to be posted on the wall on the program and put into queue for dynamic banner (displaying texts, second image). As mobile was beginning to grow in popularity, McDonald's came to us to help them get into mobile marketing. Note that this was before mobile apps and when smart phones were still in their infancy. I came up with the idea to allow users to text a shout out to the whole late night MiGente community based on the activity of members around that time (this was a campaign promoting McDonald's being open late nights). Members tended to post shout outs to each other and would say what they were up to in a public setting (this was also way before status updates). We worked with a mobile partner and got the approval of all the major carriers after securing a shortcode. We hosted a wall with a history of shout-outs from all members texting in, but we also added a ticker to all the co-branded media streaming the most recent shout-outs for all to see (well, all within the target and only during the late night hours). We made the program very contextual to McDonald's and members were very impressed...thus McDonald's was.

BlackPlanet Music Month – Sponsored by Dodge

Wired For Battle
This was the first large scale online rap battle with submissions from all over the country, culminating in a live event in the Canal Room, broadcasted online. Each year, I was tasked with developing a sponsorship calendar, tying programs into topical events. While February's Black History Month was a huge event, June's Black Music Month had the potential to be even larger with our audience. I worked with many teams to develop the first BMM program on the site, with the marquee program being Wired For Battle. After securing Dodge as our title sponsor, we began to recruit member submissions, garnering over 500 songs from members. After reviewing, we posted the top 50 songs into our battle player, which allowed users to vote for their favorites, eliminating artists each week until the final 5 were left. We them flew them into NYC to perform live in front of Styles P, a BlackPlanet.com Editor, and an Editor from Source. The show was broadcasted live with the winner Caesar taking the home studio system prize and eventually getting picked up by Rocawear for an ad campaign. Dodge had a car on-site with music from the battle playing from an iPod hooked into the car's stereo system. Dodge was really happy with the traffic and response they got from the program.


*There were also some other components, but Wired For Battle was the headlining component.

Dead Silence – Custom Horror Film Group

Customized Movie Group
This was the first group that we sold on the site, leading into this product becoming our biggest custom revenue source. When approached by Universal about doing an integrated ad buy on BlackPlanet, they wanted something engaging and at the time we just launched groups on the site. While Product Development didn't involve us (the Client Solutions Group) in the development process, I figured out a way to utilize the groups to best meet their objectives. I also wanted something that could outlive the campaign, thus I created the Horror Films Group, which has played host to many more campaigns down the line. The group didn't just force Dead Silence branding on them, it was populated with topics open to the whole horror genre, allowing members to get excited about the genre and the Dead Silence branding encouraged action.

Roots 30th Anniversary DVD

This was a viral group initiative that we worked with members on and experimented with different types of co-branded media to make our groups much more successful. When developing the program, we noticed that a lot of users were actively discussing the Roots series on their own and some were very passionate about the subject matter. So we reached out to those users, invited them into the Roots group prior to launch to populate it with content, made one a moderator, and gave many of them free DVDs. As for the co-branded media, prior to this campaign, we usually did not get very decent click-thru rates, so I had the idea to make the media follow the style guidelines of the site to appear like site content (which it technically was) and our CTRs tripled. We ran some traditional co-branded media to test that it was just the format and not the content and it was. We successfully used that same formatting on many other campaigns in the future.

HBO OZ - Sweepstakes

This is an example of a low budget sweepstakes that we did via a data-capture interstitial. With almost no assets to leverage, we built out a database of emails for them very successfully.

Verizon – Beatbox Battle

The Verizon campaign was a difficult one in that there were many (and I mean many) publishers competing for a slice of this large campaign, but only a few were to be the selected media partners. In the end, we won the business utilizing the Beatbox mixer tool that Verizon created. We made an application where members could upload their mixes to be rated by other members. We made sure that the campaign ran smoothly, and when they began to terminate all of the campaigns with every other media partner, we were the sole media partner to run in full.