Leading up to the 2013 Ironman World Championships, I crafted the idea to give an insider's view of how a professional athlete prepares for the big day and what products make this journey possible. After receiving buy in from 6 sponsors, www.linseylucky13.com was born.
I've received multiple questions about the idea/execution and decided to take the time to share my thoughts.
Start as soon as possible. And change. I started using the Lucky 13 platform and technology right away. The experimentation allowed me to realize what would and wouldn't work before Day 1 arrived. I soon found out the live streaming feature, I intended to use, wasn't an option in Hawaii. As such, we changed the originally proposed project, almost immediately.
Use a hub and spoke model. The hub was www.linseylucky13.com and we used several spokes, pitch engine, facebook, twitter, youtube & instagram to drive traffic back to the hub. I believe this should be the model for all digital media strategies.
Beat the buzz. Every year the media buzz escalates as the World Championship approaches and eventually becomes a media yelling match in final week. Lucky 13 kicked off 15 days before the race day, in the calm before the storm.
Keep it real. There are several shots, cuts, and pieces of dialogue that could–and probably should–have been edited. I chose to leave these pieces as a trade for authenticity over production quality.
Ignore the numbers. Well... kind of. I had three different analytical tools recording visits and views for Lucky 13. The hosting platform for Lucky 13 doesn't provide click through views to YouTube, so what looked like a marginally popular video on YouTube was doing really well on the hosted site. We considered driving people directly to YouTube to boost views, but decided in the end to ignore the numbers.
Have a great team. Yes cliche, and yes true. Trek, Saucony, Clif Bar, SRAM, Kamut and Speedplay all bought in right away, and gave us the creative freedom to do as we pleased. This is critical. Furthermore, design from Bigrin Design , photos from Tom Robertson, and off course the personality of the lovely Linsey Corbin made Lucky 13, well, Lucky 13.
Have fun. Because I was shooting, editing, and uploading content on a daily basis my average hours of sleep plummeted. I also spent much of my time in Hawaii staring at my computer screen. I didn't care; I was having fun.