• by James Dreesen , June 1, 2006

Media Category: "Anything Goes"
Agency: The Media Kitchen
Client: PBS' "The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson"
Campaign Title: "The Greatest Boxer You Never Knew"

Marketing Challenge: Jack Johnson packed a punch, that much was certain. Less obvious was whether PBS could. In an age of HBO Sports and ESPN, during the holiday shopping season, and with a paucity of pennies, the question was whether we could resurrect the archetype for modern celebrity athletes, preceding Ali, Bo and Mike by more than half a century.

Jack Johnson was talented, boisterous and beautiful, but he was without a Q score. In fact, early qualitative testing informed us that Jack was an actor, a baseball player and a rock star. Instead of running from Jack's anonymity, we embraced it - literally. Hence: "The Greatest Boxer You Never Knew." To the degree that we could, we borrowed and begged from the sneaker category, stood on its head the popularity and awareness of "The Greatest" one and undertook a sports marketing regiment that knocked us out of the ring of history and onto the canvas of sport.

The audience we set out to contact and convince were tagged "Freedom Fighters:" Social athletes (men: 25 - 54) who turned out for Ali and baseball because those stories weren't so much boxing and baseball tales as they were social histories told through the prism of sport.

Shocking Jack to life was our goal. We had to identify overlapping venues and vehicles where sports and history intersected.

Media Solution: With wall boards we managed to re-create Jack Johnson as he was in the early 20th Century: Bigger than life. Passersby, strolling holiday streets, were beckoned to fight night with boxing posters. Sports bar patrons rested drinks on coasters featuring Jack emerging from the hell that was the 1910s and 1920s for Black America. Magazine readers were confronted back and center by a black warrior against the world.

If our culturally conscious sports fan had a daily routine, we'd try and match it with media that walked their walk and talked their talk.

If power is with the people, 14 million viewers agreed with the Chicago Daily Herald: The two best cultural programs on TV this season have both, believe it or not, been sports commentaries. Even more surprising, they've been produced not by HBO or ESPN, but by PBS. Most stunning of all, they both concern boxing.

Results: The ratings from our efforts were significant (129 percent higher than our primetime average). In three of our spot markets - D.C., Houston and Chicago - we exceeded Nielsen averages by 276 percent, 145 percent and 131 percent, respectively. Adults 25 - 54 returned a rating 183 percent above average. And men 25 - 49 and 25 - 54 tuned in 225 percent and 214 percent greater than average. Not a bad example of fighting above your weight.

James Dreesen is director of advertising at PBS.

Winners of all 2006 winners will be presented June 7 during the 2006 EFFIE Awards gala in New York.