How PR Turned Baby Shark Into a Piece of World Series History
If you hear the words “Baby Shark” and the song starts to play in your head on repeat, you’re not alone! But Baby Shark isn’t just for kids anymore…in the fall of 2019, it was also the walk-on song for Washington Nationals baseball player Gerardo Parra. With a directive to help client WowWee’s Baby Shark toy sales grow ahead of the holiday season, Resound hatched a plan to turn a fun trend into a piece of sports history.
The Tactics: As part of a strategy to engage with celebrity parents on Instagram with a Baby Shark mailer, we developed a custom package and congratulatory note for Parra and delivered it to Nationals Park – the day after the team clinched the National League Wild Card spot and was headed to the National League Division Series. Within days, product from our mailer was all over Parra’s Instagram page (135K followers), and became a permanent fixture in the team’s dugout – from their winning streak at the NLDS to the World Series itself.
The Results: WowWee saw a 5x jump in Amazon sales within just a few days of the activation, with continued growth throughout the fall. On top of social media engagement on Parra’s page as well as the Nationals’ official Instagram page (600K+ followers), the media went crazy for Baby Shark in the dugout! In addition to frequent on-camera time throughout both championship series (NLDS averaged 3M viewers, World Series averaged 13M per game), the story got coverage across the mainstream media including The New York Times, Yahoo Sports, Washington Post, CBS This Morning, NBC Sports, and more.
The icing on the cake? WowWee’s Baby Shark plush was authenticated by the MLB as official World Series memorabilia, solidifying its place in baseball history. In fact, the image of the World Series trophy with WowWee’s Baby Shark toy inside not only remains Parra’s Instagram profile picture, it has been forever memorialized as a tattoo on his arm!