The Aurora Games – The Martin Group
How does a sports festival become a movement?
Importance? Interest? Meaning outside the grit of competition, and style emblematic of an attitude both changing the game and the conversation?
All suggestions are correct, and all were utilized to construct The Martin Group-conceived social media copy and creative for the inaugural Aurora Games Festival, the all-women’s athletics gala set to take place in and around Albany’s Times Union Center from August 20-25. Pitting Team Americas against Team World, internationally renowned athletes will compete in basketball, beach volleyball, figure skating, hockey, gymnastics, tennis, and table tennis over a six-day span, all for the chance to hoist the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Trophy at event’s end.
But the messaging and imagery devised for the Aurora Games isn’t meant to be just about games, or even the festival as a whole. It’s meant to herald the greatness of women’s athletics, embody its upward trajectory, and celebrate the personal and professional heights to where its athletes are headed.
Behind the guidance of the hashtag #JoinTheMovement across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, we are marrying inspirational and direct social messaging with clean creative imagery, all focused on the approach and achievement the Games seeks to represent. Copy harkens to athletes of the past and present, but is always seeking to emphasize the world-class nature of the subjects in question. Multicolored imagery and fast-paced animations focus on athletes in motion, and present their performance in all its sweat-dreched determination.
Working separately, each works to the promote the festival aspect of the Aurora Games. Together, they merge to notch consistent impressions, engagements, and a still-growing list of social media followers across all channels—and trumpet its subjects’ undeniable truths.
Women are strong. Women are courageous. Women are champions.
Female athletes have embodied these facts for generations, but have never had a marquee, Olympic-style international competition devoted solely to celebrating their brilliance on and off the sports stage. That’s what the inaugural Aurora Games sets out to be, complete with an international contingent of women invited to share their talent and bold vision of the future against the backdrop of a world-class sports competition.
That’s more than a festival. It’s a movement, set for illumination on August 20, 2019.
