Awareness and excitement for Spider-Man: Homecoming was very high, but fans had set the bar even higher and we risked letting them down.

Our first challenge was to live up to the Spider-Man hype by giving fans a fresh and unexpected glimpse into Spider-Man’s life.

At the time of the domestic campaign, nothing would drive more hype than the National Basketball Association (NBA) Finals. Data told us this sporting event over-indexes on core Marvel fans and mainstream audiences. However, the NBA Finals are also a hot commodity for all movie studios. There were a total of nine movies that ran trailers in the NBA Finals.

Our second challenge was to stand out amongst the many trailers being shown during the Finals.

Our four-part Spider-Man trailer follows Spider-Man as he desperately tries to attend Tony Stark’s watch party in time. Throughout the Finals, we premiered new content, continuing the story first on TV, and then online over the course of the 5 game series.

To give our content a real-time feel, live highlights were inserted into TV screens within the in-game spots, a first-to-market. Spider-Man acknowledged these highlights while on his mission, putting him right in the NBA action with audiences.

We continued blending worlds by having Spider-Man encounter famous celebrities on his quest to attend the party like DJ Khaled, Marvel icon Stan Lee, and NBA legends Magic Johnson and Tim Duncan.

To further the real-time element of the creative, featured celebrities posted exclusive content to their social handles, timed to each spot’s debut on TV, creating a sense that they had just encountered Spider-Man moments before in real life.

Spider-Man: Homecoming successfully broke through in the NBA Finals, having the highest search volume out of all of the movies with its debut in Game 1.

Across the three weeks that the Spider-Man/NBA creative played out, we garnered over 285,000 social mentions — resulting in over 1.6 billion social impressions. Overall, social mentions saw 93% positive sentiment.

The content was collectively viewed more than 40MM times online, in addition to the 17MM+ viewers per game who watched live on ABC.

When compared to the three weeks prior to this execution, interest in seeing the film went up by 17%. Our research showed that 26% of the $117MM opening box office was attributed to social mentions — social mentions that the Spider-Man/NBA Finals campaign contributed to.

Most importantly, fans came out in full force with Spider-Man: Homecoming coming in #1 at the box office on opening weekend.

The reintroduction of beloved superhero Spider-Man demands a campaign as fresh as the high-flyer himself. Therefore, the entertainment factor for Spider-Man: Homecoming had to buck tradition while creating hype for a household name that was making his acquaintance with audiences yet again.

So we produced a stand-out content series for Spider-Man: Homecoming, tailored specifically to the large-scale environment of the NBA Finals. We tied the film to the cultural zeitgeist of the NBA Finals through a first-to-market integration of real-time highlights, played in the context of a brand-new Spider-Man storyline built around and unfolding over the course of the Finals.

Social listening tells us providing too much film content in a trailer can lead to negative sentiment. Core fans want to be surprised when they see the movie.

We knew the NBA over-indexes with Marvel fans, so we created a stand-alone NBA Finals-focused storyline that embraced what audiences love about Spider-Man, showed his new connection to the MCU, and built hype outside traditional trailer format while organically connecting Spidey to the biggest media stage of the moment in the U.S.

The strategy had three core elements:

- A storyline showing what Spider-Man is doing RIGHT NOW

- Celebrity Influencers to help spread the word to fans

- Technology that enabled the content to reflect what was happening in-game in real-time

We broke our new Spider-Man story into four parts, unfolding over the course of the NBA Finals (5 games) - first rooted in TV airings then extending across multiple platforms.

Everyone loves your friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man! He has been deemed the most popular Marvel superhero by both Marvel and IGN. However, there have been five Spider-Man movies since 2002, with two different actors playing the hero, and fans were feeling fatigued. We had to change that!

After the introduction of the newest Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War, fans were clamoring for his standalone film. However, Spider-Man: Homecoming is not a reboot or an origin story; it is an all new take. For the first time ever, this Spider-Man film would take place in the Marvel cinematic universe (MCU), bringing him together with superheroes such as Iron Man and Captain America.

We needed to convert interest for Spider-Man: Homecoming by resurfacing what people love about Spider-Man while also explaining what is new and different about THIS film in order to open #1 at the box office.