This was one of the first campaigns Emily Kurek and I concepted and brought to fruition together during our time at The Partnership. Our task was to leverage NIL deals with college athletes, the social media buzz surrounding March Madness, and heated rivalries between college basketball teams to promote the nutritional benefits of milk on behalf of The Dairy Alliance and Tennessee Milk.

What we came up with was a Twitter-centered, dairy-driven take on an old-fashioned dunk contest. Throughout the month of March, we invited Tennessee college basketball fans to tweet at us in order to dunk animated caricatures of beloved college athletes and friendly rivals Zakai Zeigler and Kendric Davis in milk on an educational microsite. The more they tweeted, the more dunks in milk they triggered.

Click through to see how it all came together.

The evolution of our storyboards (courtesy of animation masterminds Golden Goose).

Taking our landing page mockups from B&W to technicolor.

I'm not saying this mockup I made for a client presentation is the reason why one of our partners said she "got chills," but I'm not not saying it.

From "meme I made in 5 seconds to make Emily laugh" to "first organic tweet of the campaign."

Celebrating a big win for Memphis fans' favorite PG with some psychedelic graphic action.

A screenshot from the final microsite, brought to life by The Partnership's brilliant in-house dev team.

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The campaign was a success, with over 10 million impressions (paid + organic) in the first 18 days and over 1.5k unique participants on Twitter, but it didn't come without challenges. The night before the campaign was set to launch, Zakai Zeigler suffered a torn ACL, tragically cutting his season short. So, we acted quickly to devise a new strategic direction for the campaign and create net-new bespoke social media content that would encourage fans to support Zakai and participate in some off-the-court competition alongside their favorite PG.

So many people touched this campaign, but it wouldn't be what it was without the contributions and expertise of Emily Kurek, acclaimed logo designer Lindsay Muncy, Golden Goose (Ryan Golden & Wes Kennison), and our creative director Lindsay Zarczynski. Plus, The Dairy Alliance was a terrifically supportive and open-minded partner in this endeavor; I'm incredibly grateful for the trust, enthusiasm, and collaboration they granted our team.

I'm so glad that this campaign was my introduction to advertising in the agricultural industry. Luckily for me, there was mooooo-re to come.