Nike China’s HBL (High School Basketball League) is the ultimate high school sporting event of the year. For many, it’s the last and biggest tournament they’ll ever play in. In 2018, Nike set out to inspire the next wave of players to up their game and reach their potential. Nike created “The Road To HBL” - a wechat experience that gives teens a first-hand experience of what it’s like to get into the team. The training, the fun, the struggle and glory of HBL. To make it real, we interviewed players, their parents, friends, fans coaches and turned their stories into scenes. There’re over 144 different combinations and up to 700 different variations so every story is unique.

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.

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.