Photo by Jean-Baptiste Bellet
For this week’s analysis, I decided to focus on my favorite sports team: The New York Knicks. Ever since becoming a fan since the Linsanity era, I’ve always kept tabs on the New York Knicks’ social media pages. For this specific assignment, I chose to take a deeper dive into one of their recent TikTok ads that coincidentally popped up on my own feed a couple of days ago.
This specific ad begins with a distinguished Knicks player and now announcer, Walt “Clyde” Frazier telling his driver to “Take him to the Garden”. From there, the camera cuts to a montage of exciting plays and b-roll of the Knicks players chanting the infamous chant “Go New York, Go New York Go!” which is a cheer heard at almost every Knicks game. As a Knicks Fan, I personally believe the ad was creative, snappy, and full of energy. It contained hidden elements and details that only Knicks fans could relate to and are primarily familiar with. They also did a great job in including clips of current players, fans, and the general New York energy that the team brings. The ad copy “Go NY Go! Get tickets to cheer on your New York Knicks at The World’s Most Famous Area this season.” is simple but effective. They are trying to display that the Knicks arena is an unbeatable experience. They also use a direct call-to-action by having Clyde say “Take me to the Garden” one second into the video. One particular element that I liked about the ad was that they weaved in text throughout the video. This add-on makes it much more accessible for those who may not have the sound on or cannot hear as well.
Clearly, this campaign’s objective is to drive ticket sales. The ones behind the ad are trying to up the traffic and conversions and send loyal Knicks fans (like me) to ticketmaster to find their next basketball game to go to. The primary target audience is clearly New Yorkers and New York Knicks fans and I would say NBA fans in general and happen to be in the Tri-State area. Based on the numbers on TikTok Creative Center, the ad did well. The exact numbers include: 3k likes, 82 comments, 52 shares, and a CTR in the top 15% of the industry average. The numbers also suggest that this particular ad is in the Top 1% in Conversions as well as Top 2% in both Retention and Clicks.
If I were to suggest a couple of optimizations, I would make the final CTA text a bit bigger as well as the shot a bit longer. As the ad is only 15 seconds, I feel those final milliseconds could do a better job in capturing my eye more by having the text stand out a bit more and making the Knicks logo bigger. I would also implement some A/B testing in order to test different audience segments and ad copy. While I do think the ad copy is relative, I feel it could use more of a direct call out.
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