The TCS New York City marathon is a Very Big Deal for New Balance, and rightly so: New Balance is the official apparel and footwear sponsor for the running event, which spans all five boroughs and is the largest marathon in the world. Among many, many other efforts, New Balance provides social coverage on its own channels before, during, and after the race, and broadcasts a commercial on TV.
I was introduced to the project on my first day at New Balance in June of 2018. The production for that year’s broadcast commercial was the following month, so I worked with the production and running events team to quickly develop a social plan.
“The primary goal was to use our social media channels to highlight the stories of runners featured in our broadcast spot: Francisco, Isaac, Mack, Jess, and Joe.”
New Balance partnered with an agency to create our broadcast commercial and product photography (New Balance debuts an official TCS NYC Marathon collection every year). My purpose in joining the broadcast production set was to use my iPhone to capture any additional content that could help tell a narrative around each runner. I planned out interview questions to ask each runner, and constantly captured behind-the-scenes content.
After the shoot, I compiled my photo, videos, and interviews alongside what the production agency captured. With everything, I created an Instagram story per runner (five total). The Instagram stories published, one per week, as marathon creative began to take over both .com and retail stores for a cohesive 360-approach. Additionally, the slides were used as paid ads for New Balance within Snapchat Discover in North America.
Note: For the purpose of display, all Instagram slides have been condensed into one continuous video. When experiencing within the platform, these Instagram stories would have been divided into 5-6 slides that you could tap through to advance to the next slide.
I also directed social coverage in the week leading up to the marathon, day-of marathon coverage, and post-marathon content. We relied on Instagram Stories, as we found that our @newbalancerunning channel had higher engagement levels when we were covering a real-time event through Instagram Stories. Below is a sample of New Balance’s race-week coverage for the 2018 NYC Marathon.
Note: For the purpose of display, slides within an Instagram story have been condensed into one continuous video. When experiencing within the platform, these Instagram stories would have been divided into slides that you could tap through to advance to the next slide. Also, not all slides within a story contain sound.
2018 NYC Marathon Expo // @newbalance
2018 NYC Marathon Race Day // @newbalance
We’re not done yet! That was just 2018. But for those of you tired of reading by now, know that the global social strategy evolved quite significantly, causing us to pull back the amount of pre- and post-race social coverage in 2019. I was lucky to once again travel to New York to cover the race itself, with the results below!
Note: For the purpose of display, slides within an Instagram story have been condensed into one continuous video. When experiencing within the platform, these Instagram stories would have been divided into slides that you could tap through to advance to the next slide. Also, not all slides within a story contain sound.
2019 NYC Marathon Race Day // @newbalancerunning
2019 NYC Marathon Race Day // @newbalance
“In 2019, we began partnering with an agency that enables us to evaluate the success of each post, as measured by adjusted media value. The 2019 TCS New York City Marathon coverage outperformed Instagram Story channel benchmarks for this on both @newbalance and @newbalancerunning by 106%.”
