NFL Social Lab

Social Media
Graphic Design
Mobile Design
Art Direction

I was lucky enough to be the lead for the NFL’s snapchat team when it first formed. I defined the look of the NFL's social channels by creating a style guide that embodies the history of the sport while giving new life and edge to the visual story. The team and I concept and churn out 15 animated videos per day for the Snapchat channel, as well as various other piece for the other social channels. and we are innovating constantly to bring new and exciting content to our viewers.

Our Snapchat channel averaged 817,00 unique views per day and 6.13 million unique users per month (as of December 2017).

Check out NFL's Social Lab site HERE.

Press: SNAPCHAT SAYS 42 MILLION PEOPLE ARE WATCHING ITS NFL CONTENT

I was also lucky to be migrated over to the NFL’s Social Lab team, where I got to work on the main @nfl social channels as well as @thecheckdown.

My Role

Created style kit that consisted of brand standards, templates, pre-made elements and icons
Used my influence as Design Lead to mentor and assist junior creatives
Concepted content ideas
Content creation (design + animation)
Became the point person new hires would go to for questions on resources, brand guidelines, etc.

In 2017, the NFL’s core demographic was beginning to age out.

The Problem

The Strategy

Generate content for the NFL’s brand new Snapchat Discover channel that would engage with young viewers and keep them coming back by creating custom content that resonates with younger users, as well as using existing content repackaged in a more digestible format.

Metrics for success

14 snaps delivered a day, 5 days a week
By the end of the year, 1 million subscribers
100K average views per day

The Action

Snapchat was a brand new platform, my team was the first Snapchat team formed at the NFL.
It was unchartered territory with no precedent.

It was the wild west!

So I had to use a system to determine what content performed well as there was no established precedent.

I used these analytics to help craft my snaps and create iterations:

Unique viewers
Time viewed (per user)
Total views
Unique top snaps (per user)
Shares and screenshots
Swipe-up rate (attachment conversion percentage)
Subscribers added

After analyzing the analytics, we realized using large articles in the Snapchat format was not effective - our users were on Snapchat to get bite-sized bits of info quick and dirty, so by using the data we evolved the way we presented and designed the content.

From this

To this!

The Work

We made 14 unique pieces of content everyday, 6 days a week. I created a style toolkit for our NFL Snapchat brand that incorporated the original NFL brand while also incorporating new colors and styles that appealed to younger audiences and felt fresh. The style kit contained design stardards so and tons of templates, pre-made elements, and animation toolkits that allowed for quick creation of snaps while also keeping everything visually cohesive.

Style Kit

The Results

We became a huge new revenue stream for the business. We had a cultural impact - we noticed fan channels trying to mimic our content. We saw tweets about our content.

Our channel averaged around 4K new subscribers daily - most of whom were 18-24… meaning that we were engaging and drawing in new young users and as subscribers they would keep coming back.