Kerri Walsh-Jennings Brand Partnership

Kerri Walsh-Jennings, three-time Olympic gold medal winning beach volleyball player, was interested in Seeking Health products and began working with Affiliate Manager, Karyn Schaffer. Karyn was able to grow the relationship and coordinate an agreement to bring Kerri on board as a brand partner. 

Kerri planned to promote Seeking Health products through her self-managed social media platforms. Although she maintained a very personal and approachable voice online, she wanted help creating content that she could use throughout the initial contract year for the brand. Karyn approached me to draft a pitch for Kerri. 

My first step was to research Kerri and get a good idea of her online presence and voice. I tracked her posting frequency and analyzed content with high engagement. I worked directly with Karyn and also consulted our internal marketing team about how we might best benefit from the partnership and then suggested we set up a meeting with Kerri to better understand her needs and constraints. 

Through our phone call, Kerri and her manager confirmed my initial assertions and reiterated that they were excited to move forward with creating personalized content that didn’t feel too commercial. They made a narrow time window available on an upcoming trip that Kerri and her family had planned to Los Angeles. I immediately started planning the specifics of a shoot that could fit. As an additional restriction, since this was the first project of this kind, I was asked by management to keep the budget as low as possible. 

The final images needed to be used throughout an entire year so I wanted to create content that covered a wide range of situations and possible promotion angles.  I planned a series of scenes that highlighted individual themes like the importance of preparation, learning, and training, and sharing joy and activity with family, all messages that Kerri mentioned were important to her.  Since we wouldn’t get final confirmation from Kerri and her team till right before the shoot, I also made sure to leave a lot of flexibility in the schedule and choose situations that weren’t dependent on specific locations, additional people, or resources.  

A few days before the shoot was scheduled to take place, we received word from Kerri that her Los Angeles trip had to be canceled and the shoot needed to be cut short and moved to her home in Lake Tahoe. 

Thankfully, since the shoot was built around individual scenes with a lot of flexibility in mind, I was prepared. It was easy enough to adapt to the last minute changes. I set up a quick call with Kerri to work out final plans and made my way up to Lake Tahoe along with Mike Brown who would be shooting video while I directed and shot photos. 

The location change caused some additional challenges to the final shoot. First, Kerri’s kids had soccer games in the late morning and early afternoon that she would have to leave us to attend. We adjusted our schedule to start before dawn since she was an early riser. This gave us more usable time overall, and allowed us to capture early morning routines that helped contrast some of the other scenes.  Additionally, we were able to add a scene that involved Kerri helping her children get ready for their games, which matched some of the themes we hoped to tackle well. 

The other major challenge was the weather.  It was September in Lake Tahoe and, although we were lucky to have a bright day, it was incredibly windy outside.  We had planned a few separate scenes at a local beach which tied together Kerri’s background in beach volleyball. We adjusted our plans take advantage of the afternoon warmth and squeezed in a trip between soccer games. We took advantage of the load-up and travel to create an additional scene and then quickly shot the family playing volleyball as well as a few posed shots of Kerri.

Final images and short video clips were delivered to Kerri and have subsequently created some of her highest engagement for partnered posts.