Brief:

Create social content for the launch of the newest iteration of the Blade racket franchise for Wilson. Content needs to accomplish informing the customer of the new tech in the racket, connect to the professional athletes on the Wilson roster who use this product, and connect back to tennis culture to reiterate the heritage legitimacy of our brand. Users must see Wilson as culturally relevant to Tennis, while informing our customers that the new BLADE v7 Performance Racket is available for sale.

My Role:

I was the lead designer for their social media campaign. I manage the full social content project from concept to completion. I managed the asset timeline, junior designers' task lists, and our partner copywriter. I was also responsible for the asset management of this project with the social media marketing team across all of Wilson Tennis’ social platforms.

All graphics executed on this page are made by humans and are assets I personally built. This is a case study to show the hands-on concept to completion.

Content

When the creative department received the BLADE v7 Social brief, it was the most robust social campaign Wilson Tennis had to date. The digital marketing schedule was 16 days of content that consisted of: a teasing phase, a pre-sale phase, product launch. To support this, the creative department has to shoot additional photography, render tech motion video, develop GIFs for Instagram, and create icons for AR filters and highlight stories.
Content was built out to include product beauty shots of the tennis rackets in the studio and on the court. Building player vignettes of Stefano Tsitsipas, Serena Williams, Simona Halep, and David Goffin with brand photography shot earlier in the year.

Be Greater Than CAMPAIGN

The campaign message of “Be Greater Than” was built to encapsulate the spirit of the Blade racket and its player, connecting them to Wilson’s strategy of connecting its customers to the legacy of an athlete training to be their best. BLADE had a lot of athlete support for assets; it was important to utilize that asset library.

Below are Player Vignette shots I selected to tell their Greater Than Story. These were shot by Nicole Gazzno, and Lauren Laws.

Flip Books

Wile sifting through all of Wilson’s Tennis player photography I noticed we had a lot of shots that looks like small animations of the players follow through swings. Since people click through Instagram stories quickly, I thought this would be a good opportunity to engage our followers in an inspiring flip book to make their favorite players swing with their BLADE rackets.

Emotion

In any craft, Being Greater Than takes a lot of work nobody ever sees. We took player quotes to heart with this social content. In the teaser post I felt it was important to really emphasize how this racket is a tool in the player’s journey to greatness. Our essence statement to the campaign was key to ground our teaser story asset on Instagram, then supported it in the coming days with player quotes and player stories, further pushing the emotional aspect associated with the BLADE Racket.

This social kit had a large volume of digital assets to execute with in a small and scrappy team.

once published, this campaign was used as an example as best in class legacy brand story telling. My team and I built a case study to showcase how we partnered with the digital marketing team, the sports marketing team, and the creative department to build a successful model for the digital marketing channel that added more value to the Wilson brand. It was built into a model that was scaled across other sport divisions within the business.

All graphics represented on this page have been executed by myself personally
All Campaign and Social Copy written by Kevin Granato
Athlete photography by Nicole Gazzano, Lauren Laws and Dustin Snipes
General Art Direction by Tim McCaffrey
Giveaway photography by Lauren Laws // Art Direction by Myself

Wilson Sporting Goods Co. is the exclusive owner of all intellectual property rights including all copyrights, trademarks, designs, trade secrets, ideas, inventions, concepts, discoveries, work of authorship, compilations, specifications, methods and know-how contained on the present page, No reproduction, use or disclosure to third parties of such content is permitted without the express written consent of Wilson Sporting Goods Co.