Champion has long been associated with high-profile traditional sports and professional athletes. In a new campaign with the tagline “How You Play,” the iconic brand is reaching out to real people having fun playing offbeat sports, whether it’s an intramural game on a college campus or a game of hoops on West 4th street in NYC. The heart of the campaign, created by The Kaplan Thaler Group, New York, is a broadband video directed by Paul Iannacchino of Creative Bubble, New York, called “See How You Play. The video showcases hackeysack, pogostick, double-dutch, hula hoop and parkour. It was seeded on YouTube and other social media sites and was also distributed through a deal with Break.com, an online entertainment destination for men 15-35.
“This is an overall branding initiative to show the clothing in a new light, making them much more lifestyle relevant. It’s not about professional athletes,” said Myles Kleeger, managing director of KTG Buzz, the agency’s marketing unit. “These are clothes that are for you and represent who you are. You can wear them while you’re playing and also while you are done playing. We wanted to up the fashion quotient while remaining true to the athletic heritage.”
The spot opens near a beach. A young man in bright blue shorts begins playing with a hackeysack, performing increasingly elaborate stunts to a driving beat. For roughly 30 seconds, the hackeysacker performs ever more incredible stunts before yielding the screen to another set of feet, this time riding a pogostick. The scene shifts to the explosive movements of a series of suburban pogostick riders. Riding specially designed, exceptionally powerful sticks, these experts perform full back flips and other stunts. The scene then takes viewers to an urban park where a group of brightly dressed parkour experts demonstrate the shortest distance between two points through spectacular acrobatics. Next we see a hula hoop expert and intrepid skateboarder, then a striking brick wall mural, in front of which a group of young women reveal their mastery of double-dutch rope jumping. The video unfolds until worlds seamlessly combine, and the skateboarder launches himself successfully through the jump ropes.
The agency chose a broadband video because this is how the Champion consumer consumes media and discovers cool, new things. “We thought it would be a more genuine way to reach them with a tactic like this, which really lets them discover it on their own,” related Kleeger.
The video drives viewers to www.howyouplay.com, where they discover that Champion created the video. “When you watch it, it’s not overtly branded. That was intentional,” said Kleeger. “Everyone in the video is wearing Champion clothes, which gave us an opportunity to showcase the clothes in a natural environment with the types of people wearing them that we would like to see wearing them.”
At the site visitors can learn more about the personalities in the video, find out about the clothes they are wearing and then purchase the clothes, truly harnessing the power of the Internet. Because the video was made for the Internet, Iannacchino pointed out that it was shot with a mini DV camera. Not only did it make sense for budgetary reasons, they had to move very quickly. All of the footage was shot on location during a 12-hour rainy day in New York. The mini DV also lent itself to the look of the film, as did the inclement weather surprisingly. “I wouldn’t have wanted to shoot this on 35 mm. I think it would have taken it outside the realm of what they wanted it to be,” explained Iannacchino. “They wanted it to feel a little more grassroots, like it came from the world that these people exist in.”
Rain, rain don’t go away “The rain was worrying, but in the end it played into our favor. The colorful wardrobe really pops off the screen for one thing, and the consistent look helps with the steady build from things you may have seen into skills and games that are probably new to viewers,” added Iannacchino. “All the skills are in camera, but we played with compositing and post to create an interesting interplay between real and imaginary. There’s a YouTube feeling to it, which is what we were after.”
He also pointed out the skills of the athletes really make the spot. That’s why casting was so important. They cast using YouTube and traditional methods. The athletes were also permitted to call a lot of their own shots regarding wardrobe and tricks to be performed, which made the video more compelling. “They each provided a good deal of input as to how they would actually wear these clothes for their individual activities. We wanted things to look authentic, so we let them take the clothing home, fashion it, distress it, change it…. It is a tribute to both Champion and Kaplan Thaler that they allowed us that much freedom,” Ianacchino said.
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