The Sports Illustrated annual Swimsuit Issue bonanza entered its next phase on Sunday as Travel Channel began its five-part series, SI: The Making of Swimsuit 2015, diving into the behind the scenes action for the magazine’s most profitable issue. The annual publishing juggernaut has also been supported by the likes of a two-city fan festival tour, a live Kings of Leon concert streamed across Time Inc. digital channels, “unprecedented collaboration with Time Inc. partners” and more, in addition to the show. This year’s 220-page print edition include what the company is touting as its most consumer activations developed in collaboration with sponsors that include Lexus, The Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp. (NCVC), Maui Jim, Smith & Forge (Miller Coors) and Schick Hydro. In terms of numbers so far, the results have been “bigger than anticipated,” notching over 4 million uniques to the swim site since launch as of Friday as well as hundreds of millions of page views and over 2 million video views on the site, according to the company.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with Brendan Ripp, Sports Illustrated Group Publisher, about the franchise and the company’s recent forays to broaden its brand.
Ripp on the state of the union: I’ve been with Sports Illustrated for a little over a year now and it’s really been the year of launches for us. There were so many video launches, including 120 Sports, which really drove innovation and change for us. As we started to look toward 2015 for Swimsuit, the push was about how we could bring Sports Illustrated to our fan base. We realized we had so much around video and mobile and not much around experiential. So that became out focus as we started to build that out broader.
On 2014 vs. 2015: One thing that worked very well for us were launches put into specific verticals. What I believe you will see more coming down the road will be more vertical launches for specific sports. The success this year will see more of that.
On the importance of consumer activations: Last year we had the beach volleyball tournament in Miami and realized how important it was for the consumers to get some experience that was both live and direct, and that’s when we decided to start building this year’s strategy to make this the most consumer-facing in brand history. Between the activations in both New York and Nashville, we touched over 50,000 consumers. We had 17 live bands in Nashville, we had sponsors activate inside our Swimville and Swim City tents, and everyone came away with an incredibly positive experience. I believe a number of our partners will be reupping for next year. Experiential is just becoming a bigger portion of the slice of pie that advertisers are using to reach consumers so when you have that marriage and it works out perfectly in terms of what we need to do as a brand, it works out perfect.
On measuring results: We are not measuring ourselves exclusively by the success or failure of the printed product. We look at every single franchise as a whole across all channels and we build a strategy on how we are going to build revenue and profit and consumer interaction across every single medium and Swimsuit is the best, most recent example of that/.
On developing content with sponsors: I would say of all the brands I’ve worked on, Sports Illustrated has done a phenomenal jobs of listening to our advertisers and what they want to accomplish as well as figuring out what tools we have to help those advertisers reach the consumer in a new and unique way. When you see the DIRECTV ads that are in the issue, I can honestly say that when DIRECTV used Hannah Davis for that campaign, we had no idea she would be the cover model. What a great opportunity for them to believe in our brand, invest in our brand, create custom content for this issue and have one of their spokespeople, if you will, also be the cover model is an amazing example of the great working relationship we have with our advertisers.
