News

Dunkin' Donuts, Major League Baseball team up in social promotion

Fans of baseball and Dunkin' Donuts now both have a chance to win thanks to a new social network collaboration.

August 19, 2015

Hill Holliday has created an online competition for Dunkin' Donuts that gives Major League Baseball fans the chance to win prizes such as game tickets every Tuesday if teams manage to score a combined 125 runs on that day.

According to Adweek, MLB and its teams will use the hashtag #MLBRunsOnDD to drive fans to a contest page. Once fans sign up, they're eligible to win prizes if the league's 30 teams combine to score 125 runs or more one each Tuesday, the one day each week—apart from Sunday—every team has a game. 

"We always look to take a 360-degree approach to make social activations even more engaging, since it makes them the most relevant to our intended audience," Dunkin' Donuts VP of Global Consumer Engagement Scott Hunter told Adweek. "[The MLB promotion] is one way that we're using this approach, and we're seeing amazing engagement levels."

Since June 2, the first day of the contest, nearly 150,000 fans have signed up, with about 6,500 randomly selected winners claiming prizes, including game tickets and free subscriptions to MLB.tv, according to Adweek.

To keep the campaign fresh and broaden its appeal to younger fans, the article reported, a one-time Snapchat activation came into play on July 21, when a Snapchat Story invited fans, via the MLB handle, to guess which of three Dunkin' Donuts iced-coffee cups contained a baseball and encouraged them to tweet tseections with a screen grab using the #MLBRunsOnDD hashtag.

The MLB campaign's Snapchat activation is notable for using one social platform to drive consumers to another platform to take action, noted Adweek. Tyler Hissey, senior digital strategist at Boston-based Hill Holliday, said the 3,450 fan tweets stemming from the one-off play exceeded his expectations threefold. Plus, with more than 100,000 Snapchat Story views, Hissey said, "even if people didn't take action, they were still absorbing branded content."