The content was already on their phones.
We stopped trying to out-produce the broadcast and let the fans make the Playoffs story with us.
Scroll the case ↓The situation
The league had the rights, the highlights and a small team. What it didn't have was a way to compete with the broadcast for attention during the biggest two months of the year. About ten of us ran social across the Playoffs. We couldn't win on volume, so we changed where the content came from.
The system
A field of phone frames narrows into 2,777 usable clips, then 20 fan-made films arranged in a playoff bracket, ending in broadcast rings reaching NBC Sports, NHL Network and the NHL Awards.
- 01Tens of thousands of fan submissions.
- 022,777 usable clips.
- 0320 fan-made films, one for every stage of the run.
- 04Picked up on air and screened on the Awards stage.
#MyPlayoffsStory retold the Playoffs through fans' own phones, in real time. We pulled clips mostly from Instagram, cut them into short films that tracked each round, and credited every fan by name. NBC Sports and NHL Network picked them up, and the work played at the 2014 NHL Awards.
I also turned the league's social listening tool into revenue infrastructure shared with the teams. About a million dollars in year one.
What happened
more than doubledMost brands, same period
Figures belong to the roles I held, not to Remix Digital clients.
Gallery
What I'd build with AI now
The hard part in 2014 wasn't the idea. It was the cut: sorting thousands of clips for quality, rights and story, fast enough to keep pace with a series. Today that's a pipeline. Models tag and rank submissions as they arrive, flag rights issues, and draft the edit list. The team spends its hours on taste, not triage.