'Give Me An A!' OK, Be The A: Human Tweets Promote X Games

by Amy Corr, Aug 1, 2011, 4:30 PM

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Depending on whom you ask, 140 characters may be too little or too many to tell your friends what's happening.

In the realm of the X Games, it's the equivalent of four rows of human spectators. 

The X Games 17 took place in Los Angeles last weekend, and Wieden+Kennedy New York created an offline way for fans to interact with X Games' athletes from an online venue.  

Introducing Human Twitter, bringing tweets to life on the small screen, with ESPN, the network behind the project.

Using the hashtag #humantwitter, fans worldwide sent tweets to their favorite athletes. Selected tweets, and the name of the Twitter user who sent it in, were then broadcast on-air for viewers to read. A group of 160 human letter holders recreated the online tweets offline.

ESPN commentators covering the event at the STAPLES Center promoted Human Twitter and explained to audiences how they could participate.

One tweet that was reenacted read: "First trick first try. Strong front flip. #humantwitter. @DavidKovacovich." From the video, it looks like someone held up the wrong letter and humantwitter reads humaitwitter. Watch it here. 

Human Twitter ran during the first round of Moto X Freestyle and throughout the finals.

A whopping 1,337 tweets using hasthag #humantwitter were tracked, and 49 were displayed by the crowd, captured and sent back to the original tweeter, an equivalent to 8 million Twitter impressions.

One lucky tweet made it into the on-air broadcast.

"We wanted a concept that felt like its own special X Games event, something that would engage both the broadcast community and the event audience at the same time," said a spokesperson for Wieden+Kennedy. "The concept of Human Twitter seemed perfect for the mixture of these digital and analog spaces."

"We had to build the technology that would allow us to push out and organize each individual character to all 160 human character holders (160 to allow for no line breaks)," they added.  "We then had to take a picture of the tweet and reply to the person with a unique response and a picture of their tweet. This feedback loop to the user is what ultimately made it a success. There's no magic in finding out days later that your tweet was held up. It was the time sensitive nature of the implementation that posed the most difficulties."

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