Through negotiations with the NBA and Griffin’s management, Kia accomplished the impossible. During the Slam Dunk contest, Griffin’s teammate, Baron Davis, tossed a pass through the Optima’s sunroof as Blake jumped over the car, caught the ball, and slammed it down the hoop.

This dunk won Griffin the Slam Dunk title. Everyone knew there would be unprecedented conversation about the event, so we set up broadcast, search, and social campaigns to bolster the conversation and keep the Optima front and center.

What made this such an elegant effort was our ‘multiplier effect’ approach to keep Optima in the minds of consumers. We negotiated with Turner to have announcers talk about the Optima before and after the dunk, had prominent athletes and celebrities tweet about the dunk using the #OptimaJam branded hash tag, and created a robust search campaign owning all terms around Kia, Optima, Blake Griffin and the NBA.

Kia saw a 24% increase in sales following All-Star weekend, making this campaign a slam dunk execution! Over 1,000 tweets using the #OptimaJam hash tag made it a Trending Topic and Top Tweet on Twitter as it saw over 5MM impressions.

Kia saw 12% more social media buzz from this event than the most watched event of the year, the Super Bowl. There was a 79% increase in traffic around Optima terms and 25% increase in traffic around the whole campaign.