Deshaun Watson signed a massive extension with the Texans on September 5, 2020. While we were expecting that our star quarterback would be getting a new deal, we had no idea when it would happen. We prepared our content ahead of time and sat on it for about 2-3 months, waiting for the moment we could let it shine. Late on Friday, September 4 we got a call from our VP of Communications letting us know that something could be in the works on Saturday so we gathered our content into one place and waiting for the news on Saturday.
Reporters broke the news early Saturday morning. As the official team account we weren’t allowed to comment on anything to our millions of followers. That morning Deshaun tweeted a simple 😎 and so as a way to play off of that we released our first piece of content: a video created by our talented videographer Tyler Suddarth.
After that teaser we knew we were going to have some down time before it became official. So we planned to repurpose a video from Deshaun’s rookie season that showed him donating his first game check to stadium employees who had been affected by Hurricane Harvey. This was an easy way for us to show the beginning of Deshaun’s impact on the city of Houston off the field.
After that we were left waiting to see when it might become official. We worked with our PR staff to make sure we were aligned on release and timing. We also had a large roster move to make that day which added another layer of complexity to the situation. We were able to release the roster moves at 4:30 and Deshaun’s announcement at 6:00.
We started our official announcement at 6:00 with the press release on our website. We linked back to that on social knowing that it would be a huge driver of traffic for the site. Since news had broken much earlier in the day we didn’t feel the need to start with something splashy because we weren’t surprising anyone. The news had been trending all day so we started off with a release that featured quotes and some more context to the signing that hadn’t been offered elsewhere.
Following the press release we went with an animated graphic to add some extra flair to the moment.
Next we went with a quote graphic from our team CEO Cal McNair who is the son of Janice and Bob McNair - founders of the Texans. Normally we’d want to keep our quote graphics more concise but given the moment and who the quote was coming from we needed to have all of it on there to ensure the full sentiment was presented. Could we have found a better way to present that? I think we might have been able to find a better way but given the time and the importance of it we rolled this out:
One of the best moments of the night was Deshaun’s press conference. It started off with several guests including Deshaun’s college and high school coaches, a Make a Wish recipient who Deshaun had made an impact on, Astros ace pitcher Justin Verlander and lastly: Deshaun’s family. Because it was a surprise that these guests would be on there we had to keep the copy rather bland but we knew since it was a big moment that we would get the viewership we were looking for regardless.
Following that press conference we knew that we had some absolutely GOLD content with the surprise of Deshaun’s family. So as not to slight the other guests we put out a tweet with screenshots of their appearances and threaded it with the clip of Deshaun and his family. Nearly 2 MILLION views later we had a viral moment on our hands!
Following that we had several pieces of web content that we linked back to, I won’t bother you with those because they were articles analyzing how important it was and photo galleries for fans to look back on what the moment met.
The next day I had saved two social-first pieces to put out.
The first: A super-hero themed piece done by our intern Nick Patterson.
The second: A timeline of Deshaun’s draft night with the radio call. Also created by our video intern Nick:
Overall it was a successful night for our digital team, the franchise and the city of Houston.