We needed to bring ‘Face Of The Fans’ to life in an authentic, impactful way that resonated with true Raptors fans to celebrate and elevate the team’s historic playoff run.

From May 21–27, 2016, Nike celebrated the team’s unprecedented success by aggregating and transforming real time fan tweets into illustrated player portraits of DeMar DeRozan, Cory Joseph, Jonas Valanciunas, and Patrick Patterson.

Tweets were aggregated from @NikeToronto and @NikeCanada, where the Raptors playoffs conversation was already in full force. Fans were encouraged to RT our post, and to download a poster or desktop version of the ‘Face Of The Fans’ images.

The full size posters were made available for download within each post on the morning of four game days during the playoff series and served as a visual rallying cry for the team’s diehard fan base throughout the playoffs and beyond.

Real time fan tweets were aggregated and transformed into a unique visual rallying cry.

Each portrait in the series was brought to life through meticulously crafted handwritten typography incorporated into illustrated portraits created by renowned Toronto illustrator Bryan Espiritu, whose art reflected Nike’s brand as well as the newfound swagger behind the Raptors success.

Due to the short time period between each playoff game and the ever-changing nature of real time tweets, each poster was painstakingly illustrated in a short period of time, putting extra emphasis on attention to the typographic detail and craft.

The full size poster was made available to fans for download on Nike Toronto and Nike Canada’s Twitter channels on the morning of game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals.

The insights and strategy for this campaign serve as a benchmark at Nike Canada for identifying a key strategic insight that led to an impactful creative concept and execution.

With only four ‘Face of the Fans’ posts on Twitter, we generated over 970,000 impressions, with an engagement rate of 3.30 as well as 19,000 media engagements.

In addition, each player, along with the Raptors, shared the portrait on their own Twitter channels, with a combined following of over 2,330,00,000 fans. DeMar DeRozan’s post led to a Reddit thread being created where fans tried to decipher any clues that tipped off whether or not DeMar was re-signing with Toronto during NBA free agency, or leaving to join another team (he ended up staying with the Raptors).

The campaign met and exceeded its expectations in terms of results but also with its cultural significance.