Because so much of what we do across Jeopardy! social is devoted to highlighting a promoting great moments from our show, we really enjoy the opportunity to bring our fans something unique when we can. Breaking up our feeds with great, original ideas keeps things fresh and drives brand affinity with new and old fans alike.
But these types of moments, like our Bouncing Wildcard GIF, dont just break up the feed, but they also serve as a sort of visual tentpole, letting our fans know that something special may be happening on Jeopardy! that week, too. In this case, we were using these GIFs (there were X in total), to build awareness and drive tune in to Champions Wildcard — our pre-season event which invited back previous champions who only won 1, 2 or 3 games for an opportunity to compete, win and move on to the Tournament of Champions.
What does a bouncing card GIF have anything to do with a Jeopardy! event called Champions Wildcard? If you're a child of the 90s, it's hard to forget the classic ending to the iconic Solitaire game (bloatware?) that was pre-installed on all Windows 95 products. While brainstorming for Champions Wildcard, we knew we wanted to play up the "deck of cards" visuals as it pertained to anything we were putting out on social that wasn't clips of gameplay, and the bouncing deck from Solitaire seemed like a natural fit for a few of us Millennials on the team.
But the question was how we fit it into the mix? We landed on recreating the bouncing deck as a means for announcing the winner of each "group" in the tournament. Our designers watched some clips on YouTube more than a few times trying to recreate the original's "randomness" (which proved to be very hard!) but the rest was pretty much a homage!
