Get DISH. Get the GOAT.
As a fortune 250 company (and far and beyond the largest company I’ve written for), I found that DISH had a unique set of pros and cons. I learned quick that the larger the brand, the more internal hurdles us creatives had to jump through. But on the flip side, because DISH is so giant, I had access to incredible partnerships, top talent, and above all, expendable production budgets. These are the perks of being a multi-billion $$$ company, I guess.
In order to promote the upcoming football season (the peak season for DISH sales), I was able to partner with ESPN and celebrity sports announcer, Chris Fowler. Not only was writing the first celebrity commercial series of my career, but I also had Disney’s resources at my disposal.
The ask was to create an OLV series starring Chris Fowler that positioned DISH as the best TV provider solution for watching football. So I wrote “Get DISH. Get the GOAT.”
The premise is that Chris Fowler is on the hunt for the GOAT of football watching. He finds DISH, but he also finds a real goat too.
So this is a cool thing we did.
A month before I wrote any scripts or did any kind of concepting for the series, my team and I did a little crowd-testing on social media to see which messages would resonate the best with our audience.
The idea was to test five different types of messaging with Paid Social and see which ones naturally rose to the top. We tested: DISHAnywhere, Gamefinder with DISH, DISH’s Voice Remote, DISH + Draftkings, and DISH MultiView.
DISHAnywhere and Gamefinder with DISH outperformed the others, so we chose them to be the featured products in the commercial series.
We were running ads, but we also were conducting a real-time, unbiased focus group. It was a smart idea.
(Yes. I’m aware the copy in these social ads isn’t exceptionally creative, but the whole point was to test message efficacy, not win Addy’s.)