Jordan Brand trades in ‘cool’ - a fickle and intangible measure that drives a significant amount of their sales.  We had a great commercial and an intriguing product, but we knew that in order to create an imprint on our core buying demographic (teens aged 12-24) and drive the desire to purchase, we needed to create a big enough media moment for our product to stand out, without coming across as overly commercial or corporate (not cool).  We needed to show teens that the people who define ‘cool’ wear these shoes, without the luxury of a built-to-fit event like NBA All Star Weekend to use for messaging.  We needed content that could live across a variety of mediums, and be screen captured and shared.  We also know that the most important time for generating sales for a shoe is the weekend of its release; given our relatively limited budget.

The Class of XXXI campaign had three phases that spread out over the course of the high school basketball season. The anthem video explaining the idea of the ‘Class of XXXI’ was successfully seeded during tryouts for high school basketball season, and viewed over 3.3MM times in “native” social environments. At the start of the season, we delivered high-end Class of XXXI-branded Jordan letterman jackets, gym banners, hats, t-shirts, and geo-targeted Snapchat filters to schools and relied on the high school players themselves to act as the initial media distributors, whose content was then reposted, liked, and favorited by media partners and Jordan Brand. At the end of the season, during the elite national high school tournaments, we extended the campaign with custom-created mixtapes of Jordan Brand high school athletes, produced and distributed by Slam, Ball is Life, and Bleacher Report, showing our athletes in action.

The integration was considered a resounding success by the Jordan Brand Marketing team; we turned 4 minutes of broadcast time during the marquee event of the summer into cultural heat. Over 58 million people – outside of the broadcast - were reached directly on brand and partner channels with Jordan-VMA integrated content. The event/integration itself was watched by 6.5MM people in broadcast and was streamed over 170MM times, including 21MM unique live streams on Snapchat. Although Nike keeps its traffic and sales numbers private, we know the AJXXXI sold out on Nike.com during opening weekend, and was Nike’s #1 selling item globally during the first week of release, setting up the line for multiple different colorway releases throughout the remainder of the calendar year.