Postseason 2017
Command center. 2017 ALDS.
October baseball was a new experience for many of us on the content team. Our campaign for 2017 — Earn It — transformed throughout the season, ultimately evolving into Earn History for the postseason run.
Leading up to this historic run, I took on the role of project manager. We prepared as much as possible with an all-hands-on-deck approach with graphic designers, videographers, and photographers.. I called meetings, brainstorms, opened up channels of communication, and laid out our goals to ensure we were all pulling in the same direction.
Starting with the American League Division Series against Boston, we activated (above) what we called a “command center,” comprising of myself and four graphic designers. This set up allowed us to ingest photos and videos, edit them, and get them ready to post in sync.
Our most successful posts varied on each platform. Speed was the name of the game in 2017 — as were GIFs on Twitter. During Game 7 of the World Series, I pre-requested a ton of GIFs to clip in the event we won. Once we got them rolling in, I used a pre-written copy to push everything out as quickly as possibly. Pre-writing also took emotion and nerves out of it, in a time when both of those things were running rampant.
Most successful post on Twitter during the 2017 Postseason. 1.37M impressions.
Most successful post on Instagram during the 2017 Postseason. 589K impressions.
83.2k Likes, 1,565 Comments - Houston Astros (@astrosbaseball) on Instagram: "SHE SAID YES! Congratulations, @teamcjcorrea!"
Most successful post on Facebook during the 2017 Postseason. 8M people reached.
Unique pieces of content
Above is a branded GIF that we started incorporating. Starting with high-quality photos from our photographer, we layered in graphics to stick out and help connect with fans. The Earn History punch out brands it as uniquely Astros and uniquely postseason.
One of our designers excelled at drawing on an iPad. We created a content series, dubbed “Legacy Series,” that captured a huge moment from each win. We chose an iconic photo, paired it with the play call, and posted the time-lapsed drawings. At the end of the season, we took those 11 drawings, printed them out, and created a contest for fans to win all 11.
The parade was a unique challenge to us — nobody in the content team had ever experienced one. While we had a photographer and videographer on every truck, I was able to push out real-time content to capture the atmosphere and capitalize on our first-ever championship parade.
