Enerel Samonte | Senior Art Director | 12+ years | Global campaigns | INMA Award-winning design
All City Awards Branding
The Oklahoman created and executed a once-in-a-lifetime awards experience for outstanding high school athletes, headlined by five-time NFL MVP, Peyton Manning. With 1,200 attendees, this marks the largest awards event in Oklahoma City, recognizing 528 athletes from over 100 high schools across 12 sports. In fact, our male-athlete-of-the-year, Trae Young, is a current super-star in college basketball which helps continue to build awareness for our event. Finally, our event contributed to our community as we selected a non-profit beneficiary, Fields & Futures, to receive a donation from the proceeds.
The Oklahoman’s
All-City Prep Sports Awards
My Role:
Establish Branding, brand assets and brand systems for all designers to use and build upon.
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Challenge:
Our challenge was to help raise awareness of the importance of high school athletics to our community because national statistics show students involved in organized athletics experience better grades, better attendance, higher graduation rates, and have a higher sense of self-worth and better social skills than non-participants.
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Objective:
The primary objective was to sell sponsorships and tickets to the event in an effort to bring in new revenue for our company. Our secondary objective was to create an event that would be a once in a lifetime experience for outstanding high school athletes at the biggest sports awards event in the history of the Oklahoma City metro area. Our final objective was to promote our award-winning sports coverage as being the most comprehensive in the state of Oklahoma.
Campaign:
We developed a multi-media marketing campaign, designed to create excitement around sports and entice friends and family members of winning high school athletes and the general public to purchase tickets to our event. We hired Five-Time Super Bowl MVP, Peyton Manning as our keynote speaker. Our campaign included print and digital ads, TV and radio spots and social media. These channels provided brand awareness for The Oklahoman, event promotion and brand exposure for our sponsors.
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Results:
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Our event created huge gains in brand favorability for our sponsors, including a 61% increase for our title sponsor, national brand Braum’s Ice Cream and Dairy Stores.
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In addition, our post-event research demonstrated that the event significantly improved brand favorability for The Oklahoman with 66% of attendees saying they viewed The Oklahoman more favorably following the event.
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Satisfaction for the event was enormous as well. In fact, 96% of attendees were pleased with the event and 95% of attendees said they would recommend the event
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Attendee quotes included:oo“The Oklahoman’s All-City Prep Sports Awards was an amazing event that blew past all my expectations!” – Diana Jones
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“We loved the awards banquet! Everything about it was well done – from the decorations and food to the speakers and award presentations.” – Laura Callahan
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“The evening was wonderful. Enjoyed seeing all the athletes together in such an inspiring atmosphere. Peyton Manning was a great speaker. Thank you for having such a wonderful event!” – Benny Coleman
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Campaign Metricsoo58,998 page views
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47,592 unique page views
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2:14 avg time on site
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CTR for digital ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads and email exceeded industry benchmarks (HubSpot, WordStream)