March Madness is the most streamed sporting event in America with over 300,000 fans watching each game on their mobile phones. This puts an enormous strain on wireless networks, causing interruptions during the games, with fans going straight to Twitter to complain.

We saw this as the perfect time to promote Verizon as the best streaming network, by providing real-time game recaps for fans served right when their networks failed.

As soon as we found a user complaining on Twitter, we responded with a short recap highlighting what the viewer missed in the game up to that point. And for the biggest games of the tournament, we enlisted professional Hall-of-Fame basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to respond on our behalf, with his own expertise and commentary. Kareem has millions of followers, and remains a popular sports personality in America.

During the games, we conducted social listening through Sprinklr, a platform providing real-time access to social media conversation. We searched for combinations of keywords relating to streaming problems, sports terms, and our competitors, while real-time tracking the status of games (scores, etc). As soon as we found a complaint from a competitor’s customer on Twitter, we replied with a quirky recap that highlighted what the viewer missed up to that point, including score, major plays, and a general direction of how the teams were performing.

For the biggest games of the tournament, we enlisted the help of a sports influencer— Hall-of-Fame basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Kareem, who was watching every game, provided a recap with his own unique point-of-view as a former college and pro basketball player. The responses were served directly from Kareem’s Twitter handle on Verizon’s behalf, adding authenticity to the experience.

The effort produced over 11K impressions—without any paid media—over the first two days alone. The share rate was 150% above average for similar social campaigns, with an engagement rate 15% higher than average. Fans also responded positively to our recaps, with likes and retweets shared at a rate 25% higher than all other Verizon social content from the previous year. And many replied directly to our influencer Kareem, thanking him for providing assistance. The organic response also produced customer leads for Verizon’s telesales team, who directly reached out to those we engaged with, offering promotional offers to switch to Verizon Wireless service.

People don’t give much thought about their wireless network, unless it fails on them. To create awareness around Verizon’s claim as best streaming wireless network, we looked for people who were not happy with their current streaming experience. From social listening, we discovered many customers took to social media—particularly Twitter— to complain about their networks the moment they experienced interruptions in their video streams. We saw this as an opportunity to create a social response campaign that could tout Verizon’s streaming claim when other networks were failing.

More and more mobile phone networks are competing for customers on price and value, with quality being less of a differentiator. As a price leader, Verizon Wireless needed to demonstrate the value proposition of being a premium carrier.

In 2018, the brand was named by Neilson as the best network for streaming, with fewer interruptions experienced when customers were viewing live videos on their phones. The brand wanted to tout its network streaming claim in a contextually relevant way that could reach prospective customers when competitors struggled to deliver service that matched Verizon’s quality.