Sprayground · Sole agency of record · March to August 2019
Coverage after the doors open is a souvenir.
Sprayground took over two floors at 4 Times Square for a pop-up in August 2019. A retail event is judged on who walks in, and an article that runs on Monday cannot send anybody on Sunday. So every placement we booked was built to land before opening day, not after it.
- Client
- Sprayground
- Principal
- David Ben David, founder
- Role
- Sole agency of record, brand public relations
- Markets
- US national, NYC-centric
Sprayground’s 2019 reel, with HollywoodLife and The Source, two of the outlets in the placement log.
The problem
A decade of celebrity collabs, and no reason for a news desk to care.
Sprayground had been running since 2010, had a Bloomberg profile in 2016, and had a collab pipeline that generated coverage whether or not anyone pitched it. Odell Beckham Jr., Alvin Kamara, Jarvis Landry, Afrojack, Fortnite, Dragon Ball Z. The brand did not lack attention. It lacked a reason for anyone outside streetwear to run a story.
That is a harder brief than a launch. When a client is already visible, the agency’s job is not exposure, it is conversion: turning attention into footfall, retail conversations and coverage in rooms the brand does not already own. A clipping in a hip-hop blog is nice. A listing on the Times Square Alliance site is a sign pointing at a door.
The account ran from March to August 2019 with a pop-up at 4 Times Square as its centrepiece, a wire-distributed collection launch, and a seeding programme built to keep product moving through editors’ hands between events.
Attention is not the scarce thing. A reason to walk in is.
The pop-up · Escape to Shark Island
Every placement timed to land before the doors opened.
Two floors at 4 Times Square, opening 4 August 2019 and running through the month. Twenty terracotta sculptures, a custom gold money machine, the first MLB design, Fortnite and anime bags, the Afrojack and Jon Z collabs, and the African Intelligence collection on the floor. Our brief was footfall, so the press calendar ran backwards from opening day.
The athlete assets, written in a day
Jarvis Landry’s back-to-school collab dropped on 1 August. We turned the write-up around overnight so the athlete story and the pop-up story would hit the same week instead of competing for it.
Trade, outside the category
A travel retail piece drafted for the Moodie Davitt Report on Sprayground entering Brand Strategy’s travel retail portfolio. Duty-free buyers do not read streetwear blogs, and that is the entire point of placing there.
The pre-press wall
RESPECT., SOHH, amNewYork, HipHopSince1987 and ItsHipHop all carried the pop-up before it opened, plus an official listing on the Times Square Alliance site. Six pieces telling readers where to be, while being there was still possible.
New York Post, worked and not landed
Direct pitches to two New York Post desks with a reference to the paper’s own 2017 Sprayground pop-up coverage. One editor replied that the week got away from her. It did not run. It belongs on the page because a case study that prints only the wins is a brochure.
Doors open
Grand opening, 11am to 11pm, hosted by the founder. The pop-up then ran for the rest of the month off the back of the week’s coverage.
The second Alvin Kamara collab
The Source ran the second Sprayground x Alvin Kamara release, three days after the pop-up announcement. Stacking an athlete drop against a retail event is what keeps a brand in the feed for a full week rather than a single day.
The recap and the carpet gallery
SOHH’s video recap of the pop-up, pushed through its own Instagram and Twitter, plus placement in HollywoodLife’s hottest celebrity pics of the week. The after-press that turns a two-day event into a month-long store.
The wire
What a paid wire actually buys, printed honestly.
On 2 July 2019 we cleared the African Intelligence collection release, 27 bags co-created by the founder and creative director Sandflower. Cision’s visibility report on that release is the only hard audience data in this engagement, and it is worth showing exactly as it came back, because most agencies quote the top line and skip what it means.
| Metric | Two-hour report | Thirty-day report |
|---|---|---|
| Total pickup, exact match | 120 | 121 |
| Total potential audience | 21,953,767 | 21,953,767 |
| Release views and hits | 213 | 2,057 |
| Engagement actions | 2 | 12 |
Read the first row and the last row together. The distribution was essentially complete within two hours, and it never moved again. The readership took a month to build, and it grew almost tenfold. A wire buys you placement instantly and attention slowly, and any agency quoting the audience figure without that second fact is selling you the receipt rather than the result.
| Outlet | Type | Potential audience |
|---|---|---|
| PRWeb | Online news | 3,158,207 |
| WFMZ-TV IND-69, Allentown PA | Broadcast | 2,098,364 |
| KOTV-TV CBS-6, Tulsa OK | Broadcast | 2,056,942 |
| Daily Herald, Chicago IL | Newspaper | 1,555,913 |
| Buffalo News, Buffalo NY | Newspaper | 1,537,817 |
| Benzinga | Financial | 1,537,078 |
| WBBH-TV NBC-2, Fort Myers FL | Broadcast | 870,274 |
| KWTV-TV CBS-9, Oklahoma City OK | Broadcast | 854,368 |
| KAKE-TV ABC, Wichita KS | Broadcast | 848,576 |
| 112 further outlets | Broadcast, newspaper, financial, online | 7,436,228 |
| 121 pickups | Exact match | 21,953,767 |
Note what is not in that list: not one streetwear title. The wire put a New York bag brand in front of local news desks in Tulsa, Wichita and Fort Myers, which is the category-widening a brand needs when it wants to be sold somewhere other than a sneaker boutique.
Coverage log
Ten placements in one week, every one logged to the client with a live link.
The list below is the coverage log we sent the founder and his team on 7 August 2019. We count nothing that was not reported to the client at the time, which is why this page can be checked rather than believed.
| Outlet | Placement | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| RESPECT. | Escape to Shark Island pop-up launch | Pre-opening |
| Times Square Alliance | Official location listing, timessquarenyc.org | Pre-opening |
| SOHH | Jam-packed weekend pop-up announcement | Pre-opening |
| amNewYork | NYC pop-ups roundup | Pre-opening |
| HipHopSince1987 | Pop-up party feature | Pre-opening |
| ItsHipHop | Syndicated pop-up announcement | Pre-opening |
| RESPECT. | Jarvis Landry photoshoot for Sprayground | Launch week |
| The Source | Second Alvin Kamara collaboration | 5 August |
| SOHH | Video recap, plus Instagram and Twitter push | Post-event |
| HollywoodLife | Hottest celebrity pics of the week gallery | 5 to 11 August |
Six of the ten ran before the doors opened. That ratio is the whole argument of this page.
What could not be counted
| Asset | Position |
|---|---|
| The ten placements above | No publisher-stated audience figures obtained for RESPECT., SOHH, amNewYork, The Source, HollywoodLife or HipHopSince1987. Media kits requested. Nothing estimated in their place. |
| Wire potential audience | 21,953,767 is the audience of the sites that carried the release, as Cision states it. It is a ceiling on reach, not a measurement of it, and we label it that way every time it appears. |
| Pop-up footfall | Door counts for 4 and 5 August not supplied by the client. Requested. |
| Afrojack collaboration | We drafted the release and ran the US side of the launch; the artist’s own agency handled Europe. Coverage in The Hype Magazine, EDMTunes and Haute Living is logged, but the two-agency split means we do not claim it as a total. |
Beyond press
The pipeline built between the events.
- Seeding programme
- Product placements brokered with HuffPost for a review, SOHH for an Afrojack unboxing, Enspire Magazine for a bag pull plus a founder feature, TodaysNew and FastMagazine, and a Fortnite creator in Spain. Editors who have handled the product write differently about it, and the relationship outlasts the news hook.
- Travel retail
- Trade placement drafted for the Moodie Davitt Report around Sprayground joining a travel retail portfolio. Duty-free and airport retail is a distribution channel, not a press category, and a trade byline there is read by buyers.
- Athlete calendar
- Jarvis Landry’s back-to-school collab and the second Alvin Kamara release both worked into the same week as the pop-up, so three separate stories reinforced one another instead of splitting the audience across three quiet weeks.
- Founder positioning
- Interview pipeline and a long-form question and answer programme built for the founder as a design and business voice rather than a product spokesman. An Emez interview and a Celebuzz booking were both in motion when the engagement ended.
- Sponsorship
- Brand sponsorship arrangement with recording artist Mariah Lynn, handled alongside the editorial work.
What it cost
The honest part.
Two things went wrong and both are worth printing, because they are the failure modes of event PR rather than a bad week.
- Fulfilment was the bottleneck, not bookings
- On 7 August, the same email that carried the coverage log was still chasing product shipments for placements that had already been confirmed. An editor who agrees to review a bag and then waits for it does not write the piece, and the agency cannot fix that from its side. Seeding programmes live or die on the client’s warehouse.
- Two interviews died unlogged
- A Reuters request in mid-July and a Celebuzz booking scheduled for late June both fell away without a recorded outcome. At the volume the account was running, the things that slipped were the ones nobody owned on a calendar.
The engagement’s substantive work ends on 7 August 2019, at the account’s highest visibility point of the year, without a wrap report. That is the cost of stopping at a peak instead of documenting it.
A case study that prints only the wins is a brochure.
Why it worked
Three things that transfer to any retail activation.
- Run the calendar backwards
- Start at the door date and work back. Anything that cannot be live before opening is after-press, which has a different job and should be budgeted differently. Six of ten placements before the doors opened is not luck, it is the deadline the pitch list was built against.
- Stack, do not space
- An athlete drop, a second athlete release and a retail opening inside seven days read as a brand having a moment. The same three items spread across a quarter read as a brand doing maintenance. Compression is free and almost nobody uses it.
- Place outside the category
- Travel retail trade, local broadcast, business wire pickups. A streetwear brand covered only by streetwear media has already met everyone it is going to meet. Growth comes from the desks that have never written about you.
Culture brands do not need more coverage. They need coverage that arrives in time to matter.
Playbook MG is a boutique public relations and influencer agency in Brooklyn, working with culture-rooted brands and founders across fashion, beauty, food and beverage, music, entertainment, arts and nonprofits. Playbook MG was Sprayground’s sole agency of record for brand public relations during this engagement.
All case studiesPlaybook MG · Industry City, Brooklyn · Wire audience figures as stated by Cision · Coverage as logged to the client, 7 August 2019