With Vine sitting on top of the U.S. App Store's list of free apps, advertisers are finding ways to master Twitter's six-second video sharing platform.
Although a 12-person peanut butter company found a way to turn a profit on Vine with a simple instructional video showing how to make a pb&j sandwich (which ends with a buy-one-get-one-free coupon), it's Playstation that is really taking full advantage of what Vine has to offer. For PlayStation's MLB 13: The Show, the company is melding the ultimate old-school sharing medium with a new-school sharing platform. PlayStation is trying to "reinvent" the baseball card on Vine.
Of course, there are some key differences. A Vine baseball card can never become a rare item that will appreciate in value, a key factor for what made its predecessor desirable. Although considering that the baseball card industry declined from a $1.2 billion business in 1991 to less than $300 million 20 years later, its reinterpretation on an up and coming platform was bound to be different.
Blitz Agency handles PlayStation's social media endeavors. Director of social outreach Jonathan Nafarrete told BI, "We always thought baseball was rooted in the history and nostalgia of baseball cards. And because [Vine] lives on Twitter, it still has that sharable component. Instead of passing a physical card to friends, you retweet it."
What makes Vine's campaign so cool is that Blitz recreated and animated the faces (as they appeared on Twitter) of sports bloggers, baseball stars, and well-known fans and put them into an animated baseball card for their favorite team.
"I know that Vine is super new," Nafarrete said, but the pitch to PlayStation was easier than he expected. "It's the evolution of the gif. We were trying to find a cool way to combine in-game footage, unique camera angles, game audio, and we really wanted to highlight the player creation aspect [of the game]."
The only problem: It takes a ton of time.
First Blitz worked with an artist to turn an influential fan / blogger / baseball personality's Twitter avatar into a player. Then they had to actually play the game, taking each player from the minors to the majors. (Some cheat codes were involved.)
This was followed by more playing — Blitz had to capture players getting grand slams and striking people out.
Finally, Nafarrete said, "With Vine, you can't import video. You can only shoot with an iPhone." This means that Blitz had to compile all of the footage, make an engaging video, and then shoot it off a monitor.
Blitz made 30 "baseball cards" in a week and are rolling out more.
While this is the most intensive Vine campaign we've seen, Nafarrete said that brands' innovation on Vine is only starting. Considering that Vine has made it to the top of the App Store charts, he expects that agencies are pitching to their clients now, and we'll see a lot more in the next two to three months.
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