ESPN logs its most successful all-day live Twitter vote campaign with #WhosGonnaWin

In collaboration with Verizon and their partnership with the Empire State Realty Trust, ESPN logged its most successful all-day live Twitter vote to date last Friday with #WhosGonnaWin, the first-ever social media driven light show on the Empire State Building. The on-air integration with ESPN’s flagship program SportsCenter, NFL Live and NFL Insiders was also a key component to the entire Super Bowl XLVIII-related program.

Fans correctly predicted the Seattle Seahawks to triumph over the Denver Broncos; the Seahawks captured 50.4 percent of the votes to light up the iconic building in blue and green last Friday prior to the big game. VP, Games & Partnerships Raphael Poplock spoke to Front Row about the campaign’s successful team effort across ESPN platforms:

How are you measuring success for this specific all-day live Twitter vote compared to previous ones?
#WhosGonnaWin produced 63 percent more voting tweets than our previous record for the BCS National Championship. It was also a trending topic in dozens of geographies on Twitter in the hours leading up to the live reveal on SportsCenter. We’ve done these previously on SportsCenter for big events like Game 7 of the NBA Finals and the Mayweather-Alvarez fight, but never for the Super Bowl.

Can you give us a sense of the amount of coordination that went into this hashtag battle?
Early on in our Super Bowl planning, we had talked about doing an all-day Twitter vote across TV, Radio, Digital and Social. As it turned out, Verizon had their week-long #WhosGonnaWin campaign, and they recognized the level of scale we can bring to engage sports fans on multiple platforms.

Executing this required a tremendous amount of teamwork across our TV, Digital, Ad Integration, Sales and Marketing groups. The payoff was worth it, being a part of the first-ever social media driven light show on the Empire State Building. We were also able to work with Mass Relevance to produce ESPN.com’s first socially-enabled custom co-branded ad unit on the homepage, featuring a live vote count. It’s a perfect example of how we are able to serve fans with unique experiences around big sporting events as well as marketers with innovative ad solutions.