Client: Pepsi, Carnival Cruise, ACC

Project: NFL Rookie of the Year, Rookie Cruise Campaign

Capabilities: Messaging, Stakeholder Presentations, Copywriting, Ads, Email

At the end of 2021, I received a call from ACC about getting my help last-minute with an upcoming campaign that would feature NFL QB Justin Herbert. They had never worked with a freelance strategic copywriter as they typically operate more as a PR team than an advertising agency.

The campaign would leverage Herbert’s Rookie of the Year award to encourage first-time cruise guests to enter to win a free cruise from Carnival. Pepsi Zero Sugar was also involved in the campaign as they sponsor the Rookie of the Year award.

Updating the Messaging Framework

They had already made some good progress on putting together an overarching theme plus three messaging pillars. I began by updating their work and trying to bring out the QB connection a bit more, “Calling all rookies! When Justin says, ‘Go!’ you go long!”

CREATING A MIX AND MATCH LIBRARY

Once we had sign off on our updated pillars, I began to tease out some examples of how to apply this new messaging to some of the other campaign assets, things like ads, emails, and the landing page.

Since another marketing team would actually be executing on the rest of the campaign, I needed to give them a wide range of options to create a mix-and-match library they could pull from. Click on the images below to expand them.

The Promotion

The team ultimately decided to go with the ‘Board a Rookie. Return a Pro,’ language for the primary campaign promotion graphic. This was my suggested variation on their original idea of, ‘Board a Rookie. Leave a Pro.’

IN SUMMARY

• I only had about 2 weeks to work on this, but in that short amount of time we accomplished quite a bit and this set the rest of the team up well for their side of the execution.

• I would have liked to get a little more feedback along the way from the different stakeholders, but schedules didn’t allow for that.

• Due to the fact of never working with a freelance strategic copywriter, there was a little bit of a learning curve in terms of tools, workflow, and collecting feedback. Regardless, the ACC team was great to work with and I look forward to working with them again in the future hopefully.