Background: Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is a global mixed martial arts sports organization. Digital Royalty (dR) concepted and promoted various events leading up to UFC 104 in Los Angeles and UFC 106 in Las Vegas. Events that were scheduled leading up to UFC 104 and 106 events included twitter-centric scavenger hunts and autograph sessions with UFC fighters at Los Angeles-based and Las Vegas-based Kmarts.
Approach: Leading up to UFC 104 and UFC 106, a contest was launched exclusively on Twitter surrounding the series of in-store autograph sessions with UFC fighters. The challenge was to integrate two brands, UFC and Kmart, while raising interest and awareness for the contest/ticket giveaway. Digital Royalty facilitated the branding of the contest across multiple channels by establishing uniform hashtags, #UFC104Contest and #UFC106Contest. In addition, dR captured multiple videos, short interviews and photos for distribution to a base of more than 1.9 million individuals.
Results: More than 1,900,000 direct unique impressions were made in less than a week. Along with tweets co-branded with #UFC104Contest and #UFC106Contest hashtags and Kmart mentions, videos and photos were distributed by both UFC and Kmart networks. A total of two thousand fans showed up at Kmart as a result of the Twitter contest. Behind-the-scenes videos were hyper syndicated across the UFC digital universe reaching millions on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In addition, the winner of the UFC 104 Contest was able to locate UFC representatives, solely through directional tweets, in five seconds to claim his ticket prize.
