EMVIEs 2014: Crowd-sourcing Cricket Stories

Mindshare worked around the insight that what keeps Team India going is the love, cheer and support from the millions who follow the sport. The agency decided to pay an ode to the cricket crazy youth of India - from gully to stadiums, from cricket clubs to rough grounds. Research showed that 60 per cent of the internet users in India use social media, and 40 per cent of them were in Nike's target audience demographic.

They asked their followers on social media to share pictures and stories of themselves on social media and promoted this campaign through tweets, hashtags, Yahoo! Cricket and Cricinfo. The social media buzz that was created led to a snowballing effect. Every snap that was sent to the site was instantly made into an ad film, asking followers to share more of their stories and pictures. People from smaller towns like Varanasi started participating more and more. From around 2 lakh entries, 1,400 made it into a final film which was edited to make a short video on cricket.

The youth who had idolised India's cricketers now had their own stories shared on social media. As for Mindshare and Nike, they used user content to create a bigger reach for themselves and an impact in the minds of the youth.