A custom-fabricated, 5G-powered drum major’s mace. Built from scratch, broadcast live on ESPN and ABC.
Cricket has been the title sponsor of the HBCU Celebration Bowl at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta since 2020. For the 10th annual game, the brief was not a TV spot. It was a question: how do you make Cricket’s HBCU commitment feel genuine rather than corporate, and prove the 5G network in a packed arena at the same time?
The answer: put a 360-degree camera inside the drum major’s ceremonial mace, power it on Cricket’s 5G network, and stream what the drum major sees in real time. Give the marching bands, the cultural heartbeat of this event, something neither the crowd nor the broadcast audience had ever seen. Budget: $50,000. All in.
This one was personal. My family’s history runs through HBCU band culture, from Southern University to Prairie View A&M to Grambling State, and my father played trumpet in the Grambling State University band and went on to study music education himself. I grew up around that world, but I went to school for journalism, not music; I was never much of a musician. What I came away with instead is a good ear and a set of tastes that still shape how I see and hear everything I make. HBCU bands sit at one of the real cores of Black music and Black culture in this country, and so much of what moves through American culture today, musically and otherwise, traces back to that root in some way. Getting to build something for this event wasn’t just a production job, it was a chance to put a camera inside a tradition I already loved.
Integrated Producer, leading production from concept through final delivery: coordinating across Cricket’s internal team at Greenlight Studios, experiential partner YAH Agency, influencer talent, HBCU students creating content through the weekend, and drum majors from Southern University and South Carolina State University who carried the mace at the College Band Jamboree.
The production started with the object itself: managing fabrication with SCPS Unlimited on a custom build embedding a 360-degree camera in the crown and color-changing LEDs along the staff, all running on 5G without lag inside a 70,000-person stadium. Isaac Williams, a former HBCU drum major, consulted on the design so the weight, balance, and look were authentic enough to belong on that field.
From there it became a live production. No resetting shots, no second takes on the coin toss. A mini-series of content built around the mace and the weekend: BTS coverage, social content, a live Instagram stream from the mace itself, Atlanta news presenting the mace before kickoff, on-site editing, and real-time social rollout.
South Carolina State 40, Prairie View A&M 38, in four overtimes. The 360-degree live stream ran without interruption inside a packed arena. ESPN coverage across the coin toss, halftime, and trophy ceremony reached 2.3 million viewers.
1.1 million social views, up 109% year over year. 32,700 engagements, up 80%. Shares up 35%. New followers up 270%. Over 750,000 earned media impressions. Boosted mace footage outperformed engagement benchmarks by 41%.