Brandon GeorgeCreative Director Start Something

A2 CLEVELAND / ATLANTA · SUMMER 2010 · SELF-FUNDED 01 · Nothing exists yet 02 · Nobody knows

A student with a camera and no money made the front page of The New York Times.

Twenty-three increasingly painful videos asking LeBron James to stay in Cleveland. Three days to SportsCenter. One week to word that he'd seen them.

The stakes

I was a copywriting student at the Creative Circus with no audience, no budget, and no business asking anyone for anything.

LeBron James was about to become a free agent on 1 July 2010. Northeast Ohio is where I am from. A major trophy had not landed there in over fifty years. Now it was about to find out whether the best player alive thought it was worth staying for.

Nobody was going to outspend Miami. The only currency Cleveland had was how much its people cared, and nobody had ever found a way to put that in front of him.

The move

Film twenty-three challenges. Same number as his jersey. Same number as Jordan’s.

Painful ones. Embarrassing ones. The kind you can’t watch without sending to someone else. I waxed my chest. I took twenty-three slaps to the face. Then I put all of it on a website built for exactly one reader: InLeBronWeTrust.com.

The pitch was never “please stay.” The pitch was “look what we’ll do for you, and we’re not even good at this.” That’s the whole trick. Devotion is boring. Devotion that hurts is a story.

The proof

A photograph of the printed New York Times page continuing the story from A1, with a picture of Brandon George in an I-heart-LeBron shirt
The New York Times, in print. The jump from A1 ‘To Lure Basketball Star Away From Cleveland, New York Catches LeBron Fever’
The YouTube homepage with the InLeBronWeTrust video at the top of the Most Popular column
Top of YouTube, as ‘Most Popular’ Cleveland / Atlanta · summer 2010
The MSN homepage carrying the InLeBronWeTrust video in its featured strip
Homepage of MSN. ‘Fan goes to extremes to keep LeBron’ Cleveland / Atlanta · summer 2010
A list of the InLeBronWeTrust YouTube challenge videos with their view counts
The channel. 128,675 views on ‘23 Face Slaps’ alone Cleveland / Atlanta · summer 2010

That’s the jump. The story continued inside. The front page it started on isn’t in the archive, and it isn’t going to get faked.

Front page, A1 not recovered · July 2010

The receipts

3 days from launch to ESPN’s SportsCenter
1 week to a team rep confirming he’d seen it
250,000 pageviews in three months
150,000 unique visitors

Press: The New York Times · YouTube homepage · MSN homepage · CNN · NBC · FOX · CBS · NPR · The Today Show · Good Morning America · ABC World News · ESPN SportsCenter and SportsNation · ESPN.com · SportsIllustrated.com · Yahoo! Sports · The Huffington Post · The Jim Rome Radio Show · The Atlanta Journal-Constitution · The Cleveland Plain Dealer · The Washington Post · The Washington Examiner · The New York Post · St. Petersburg Times · Cleveland.com · SPIKE TV · HoopsHype · Mental Floss

Live interviews: ESPN · BBC · MSNBC · ABC World News · CBS Cleveland · NBC Atlanta · WTAM 1100 Cleveland

The credit

Mine, and everybody who let me hit them or wax them on camera.

He went to Miami. Then he came home four years later and delivered the championship he’d promised. That is the ending. Just not the one anybody wanted in July.

The reason this case sits at number two isn’t the New York Times. It’s that in 2010 I was the creator with no audience and no money, and I ran this playbook on myself before I ever sold it to anyone. If you are currently that person, this is the only case on the site that matters to you.