MLB worked with Versus and Director Damien Drake to create MLB’s “Let the Kids Play” campaign. Produced during Spring Training, this campaign was conceived to spotlight Major League Baseball’s fresh crop of superstars and their off-the-field personalities. The opening day creative establishes a news conference setting that contains a back-and-forth banter of trash-talking, competitiveness and bragging with the game’s brightest young stars. Among them, Mike Trout, Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, Ronald Acuña Jr., Christian Yelich, Shohei Ohtani and others.
The players had to be shot separately given their chaotic schedules, as it wasn’t possible to get all of them in the same room together. Despite that, the players ran with the material, often improvising their lines, and engaging stand-ins as if they were their contemporaries. Once completed the Versus team was brought in to create a uniform press conference look, as well as composite all the individual scenes into one fluid and seamless conversation.