In mid November the London-based social agency The Wild released a wrap video of its ‘Bases Covered’ YouTube series for Major League Baseball.
With a brief to excite and educate 18 to 34-year-old Europeans about baseball through original, social-first content, the series began when Covid-19 postponed the season start and it was then shot and produced during lockdown.
Each weekly episode exploring a different facet of the game – such as batting, pitching and even ballpark food.
The online videos featured appearances from MLB stars, celebrities and influencers (ranging from six-time baseball All-Star Chase Utley to former World’s Strongest Man Eddie Hall).
Dylan Davenport, Managing Director of The Wild said: “We moved away from ‘make an ad’ territory and instead developed ‘Bases Covered’ – a new, personality-led, serialised show to bring the MLB brand experience to life.”
“We worked closely with MLB and our host/ambassadors to swiftly adapt our strategy to produce and film the ‘Bases Covered’ series entirely in lockdown. Every day seemed to bring new limitations to what we could and couldn’t film, our access to guests, our ability to work. So we decided to swim with the tide, to embrace the chaos and allow it to dictate our creative output.”
Results:
The first series generated more than 3.2m views, delivered 7.2m impressions and more than 641,000 tooal unique viewers.
The episodes commanded an average watch time of more than four minutes and the campaign boosted MLB’s regional following by 30,000.
Comment:
For most Europeans, even committed sports fans, baseball doesn’t mean that much and this was the serious challenge sitting at the core of the MLB brief to The Wild.
And as if that wasn’t hard enough, as the season was just preparing to get underway, the pandemic struck the season was delayed and chaos and uncertainty ensued.
A new task emerged: how to win over this unengaged, untapped audience with no baseball games to work with and without even being allowed to leave the house.
Looking at the results, a round of applause is in order.
It is not at all surprising that The Wild was commissioned to create a second series which will be called ‘Bases Covered: Virtual Road Trip’.
Season 2 will see the team go on a virtual road trip to different baseball teams in their cities: ambitious given that no one can actually get to America.
Links:
Major League Baseball
The Wild
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