The Bases Loaded Sweeps was an interactive Flash experience starring two of baseball's hottest young pitchers at the time, powered by ePrize and in partnership with 2K Sports. On the Bases Loaded microsite, users would enter a code (printed on Iced Coffee cups), and watch a segment of a "2k8" MLB game play. In it, one of the two hottest closers of the 2008 season—the Yankee's Joba Chamberlain or Red Sox's Jonathan Papelbon—would throw a pitch to you, resulting in a hit or a strike-out. A hit, or better yet, an HR, was a “win.”
After the play through, the user would be served video of a staged news conference in which either Joba or Pap answered questions regarding that night’s game. The press conferences were upbeat if the pitcher had closed the game out (meaning the user had lost) and a little more tense when the user had won—especially if the pitcher had been taken yard in the process.
This was a sweepstakes, not a competition, so there was no player skill involved. In fact, it was tacitly portrayed in the client's original brief as a scratch-off game, but we felt this experience would be more engaging and generate robust first-party data. For that reason, we focused on ways to make the site "stickier." The whole game-reveal schtick would be fun once or twice, for sure, but we didn’t feel it was going to keep people playing day after day for four weeks (that's about how long it was live).
Our solution was to give users points for each play-through. Those points could be used to unlock items in the Locker Room such as Dunkin’ Donuts mouse cursors, virtual bobbleheads of Jonathan Papelbon and Joba Chamberlain, desktop wallpapers, video baseball cards, and so on.
A user interacting with one of the clubhouse items. A radial menu shows the option to unlock the item with their points.
This tactic proved very successful; we had tens of thousands of downloads of the most expensive items, and even more of the lower-level digital assets.
Below is a collage of various screens and promotional media.
If you’re wondering about the picture that was used as the thumbnail for this project, the larger shot is below. This was taken by me on a Nikon D70 while we were between takes down in Florida at Yankees/Red Sox Spring Training. It wound up being used as a desktop background that could be unlocked in the Clubhouse.
ACD: Max Fresen; Copywriter: Jane Goldman; Designers: Joaquin + Sandra
