This project was a Brand Level social media campaign that brought a 101% engagement increase from any other social campaign done by Wilson Tennis to date. I’ll walk you through how I, and my team, achieved this. Pro Staff is the heritage racket franchise for Wilson Tennis. Revamping it in any way is a big responsibility from not only a marketing stand point, but a design standpoint. For this campaign I was on a social media design team taking care to make this racket look vintage, but also modern. I worked with a Senior Designer, a fellow Graphic Designer, and Copy Writer to create the story of Pro Staff v13. It’s important to note that this racket launch also happened amidst a pandemic, and we did not have access to our typical photographers or our top athlete Roger Federer at this time. This project called for a needed to collaborate with him for photography in a way we never had to before. This is what resulted from the creative problem solving my team did.

Vintage Modern with Film

As part of the Pro Staff heritage, we reference our own history back to 1983 when the first Pro Staff was put out into the sport. The original racket had pinstripes, an element that was brought into the modern version 13 racket we were presenting. As a call back we went analog with our photography and did an entire product spec outline through the lens of polaroid photography. We also showcased Roger Federer in this way as well with his version of the Pro Staff v13 racket [a unique model in the line] Through video, animation, and retro film photography we called to the past while placing it in the present.

Instagram Filter - Spark AR

With this racket being one of the biggest heritage franchises of not only the sport of Tennis, but for Wilson, we wanted to do something unexpected. Knowing we were growing our team of influencers and our visuals were heavily influenced by old photography, I suggested we make a Pro Staff Instagram filter. I had never tried designing or wire-framing a VR filter before, but I was confident I could learn. Below is the filter Wilson Tennis published and as of 2020 over 144,000 people have interacted with this filter.

Instagram Grid - Ending Stats

Ultimately I was just 1 of 3 other designers on the team for this Pro Staff project. Another note worthy responsibility I had was ‘keeping the Bible’ which is a PDF Go By document I created for Creative and Marketing to keep track of posts, copy, notes, changes, etc. In the end I took all of our work and placed it in our Instagram grid to show the over arching tone we achieved, visually, for the Pro Staff racket campaign. In the end Wilson receive 12x more pre-orders for rackets than it has ever seen in it’s modern time. We obtained 54,000 more email subscribers to our exclusive Wilson Insider email list. We also increased organic engagement to 101% more than previous social campaigns Wilson put out. All and all this project is a reflection of a great effort from Marketing and Creative in bringing something old, and making it new again. Little bit vintage, little bit modern.

All Graphics shown on this page were executed by Myself
All campaign copy written by Kevin Granato
Additional Graphics // Alex Ritter, Lauren Versino, Nicole Gazzano
Athlete Photography by Roger Federer and his team // Art Direction Nicole Gazzano
Product Photography by Lauren Laws // Art Direction Nicole Gazzano

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