The World Baseball Classic is Back
After a six-year absence, the World Baseball Classic returned with a big bang. This was a tremendous opportunity to put baseball on the biggest stage. Also, it was a chance to push player marketing forward by leveraging social media apps like Tik Tok, using content creators and more.
The result? It was the most-watched WBC since 2009. The championship game between Japan and the United States was the most watched game ever in the U.S., up 60 percent from 2017.
The tournament attendance in the four host cities came in at 1,306,414, a 20 percent increase from the 2017 tournament.
In my role as a coordinator, I worked as conduit between our media team, social media team, global marketing team and marketing team to create content leading up to the WBC. My role was to be a creative and a project manager. I was a producer in our YouTube series, worked with designers to create assets for the tournament and kept schedules and workback calendars for the delivery of content.
In this page you will see the commercial spot that led the campaign, a YouTube series and player photoshoot. Also within are the assets that were used across a number of channels including players’ social media, MLB’s social media and the FOX broadcast.
Total Views on YouTube: 536,000
Total Views on YouTube: 481,000
Total Views on YouTube: 396,000
As part of the marketing efforts before the tournament, I led the development of three features for YouTube on three countries. The series “Behind The Flag,” peeled the curtains behind Mexico, Czech Republic and Italy as they prepared to represent their countries.
Behind the Scenes
Player photoshoot
In this WBC, we wanted to harness the marketing power of our players in a way that baseball hadn’t seen before. Behind a true team effort among departments, we worked to create a photoshoot for players that could be used by teams, players, our social media channels and our broadcast partner, FOX. This feat needed to be executed in three different countries with different photographers while still looking identical. We worked on simplifying the look while maintaining the vision we had set to achieve from the beginning. This photoshoot was used by our players and our accounts to promote the games and tournaments.
Impact
WBC accounts: Average daily engagements per post more than doubled (102 percent) during the semifinals and final rounds of WBC across IG, FB and X.
Shohei Ohtani’s IG increased more than 2.1M during the tournament, an increase of 89 percent.
Randy Arozarena increased his IG following by 329 percent.
