Climb the Week, Sprint the Weekend
This content series is one of my favourite projects at Virgin Active South Africa. I've posted many of the videos here, but the compilation edit above is a good distillation of the project, although it's more sexy montages and less of the actual content.
Background:
Virgin Active is the official training partner of both the Cape Town Cycle Tour and the Absa Cape Epic, the two most important annual cycling races in the country.
The brief:
1. Create content that supports the thousands of VA members who cycle on and off-road.
2. Encourage our cyclists to take a more holistic approach to their training by attending group exercise classes like yoga, Pilates, the Grid & H.E.A.T (functional training). The reason for this is that research shows that members who attend group classes or use a personal trainer are 50% more sticky.
The solution:
Climb the Week, Sprint the Weekend: a series of medium-length content pieces focusing on two Virgin Active staff members, Alain "Junior" Walker and Ignus "Iggy" Oosthuizen.
The idea behind the name is that by doing the hard training during the week (the climb), you'll optimise performance and fun over the weekend (the sprint). Our target was weekend warriors. The huge proportion of cyclists who cycle on the weekends, but don't take it too seriously.
The content:
Over the video series, Alain and Ignus share their insights and chat to professionals in the cycling world about:
1. How to use indoor cycling to maximise your weekend ride.
2. How to buy your first bike.
3. Essential mountain biking skills.
4. Road bike setup and skills.
5. Functional cross-training for cycling.
6. Race nutrition.
7. The perfect warm-up.
8. Yoga and Pilates cross-training for cycling.
9. Prologue, mid-race, and Finale videos for the Cape Epic.
What worked:
Alain and Ignus were the perfect duo for this series, with Alain playing the part of student, and Ignus as teacher. Their on-screen chemistry was great, their partnership strong, and they were entertaining to watch. Strategically, Alain spoke to weekend warriors and Ignus to competitive athletes.
The content was beautifully captured by RainedUpon Media, and I can't recommend them enough.
Our in-house production team supported the process brilliantly, with Ashleigh Jarratt and John Bursey orchestrating all the moving pieces masterfully.
Ryan Swindale supported the video content with brilliant art direction, and was my conceptual partner in bringing the project to life.
Finally, the partnerships team (Patrick Hardy and Dinisha Pillay) and leadership team (Alain Walker pulling double-shifts, and Carla White) gave great feedback and helped us "use every part of the cow" across all of our channels.
What didn't work:
Media - Yes, sometimes organic content can earn a firestorm of PR, views, and engagement, but don't count on it. The truth is that organic content is dead, or an incredibly bad bet. Facebook&Friends have replaced their predecessors with the promise of free media space, but now that they're dominant, and we're back to a pay-for-play system. This project didn't get the reach and engagement we wanted, and I think that's largely due to not getting it in front of the audience.
Depth - We cut our videos to between 4 and 8 minutes, and I think that's too short to really provide viewers with valuable content. The trend we're seeing on YouTube is that people will watch longer videos if the content is worth watching.
In advertising, we plan every angle, prop, and title. Everyone person who appears on-screen is carefully cast, styled, and directed, and nothing is left to chance.
Content like this is different. It's long form, produced when busy schedules can accommodate, and impossible to plan perfectly.
In the making of this series, I had to learn to let go, trusting our cast, production team, and guests to do their part.
