It’s Monday Night Football! Who is ready for some football? Some are anticipating the matchup, but
there is more hype going on today beyond the two teams.
Fast food chain, Dunkin’ Donuts, will seize the opportunity of sports and social media convergence tonight as they debuted their new Vine TV ad during tonight’s Monday Night Football pregame show, before the Philadelphia Eagles and Washington Redskins took the field to battle it out during week one of the 2013 NFL season.
The five-second ad, whose spot is usually consumed by a static billboard-type logo with the sponsor’s name mentioned, will be transformed into a moving video that will feature a latte flipping a coin to emulate the game starting coin toss. As the main sponsor of Monday Night Football, Dunkin’ Donuts will be showing more of these clips throughout the 16-game season.
This isn’t off-base, but an expected step as advertisers embrace social and social thrives on advertiser use. Increasingly, sports games, due to their high viewership and favorable platform demographics, are becoming as much about advertiser and sponsor content as they are about the game. Football and great commercials have become synonymous since the 1970s when the hyped Super Bowl adds didn’t disappoint as companies such as Master Lock and Xerox tested the waters with new, edgier campaigns to run in the coveted ad spots. In fact, at Superbowl XVIII, Apple premiered their commercial titled, 1984, which introduced the MacIntosh and was a play on Orwell’s book and the concept of Big Brother (interesting in retrospect, huh?).
And on Saturday, Marshall Mathers (Eminem) debuted his new video, Berzerk, during the University of Michigan vs. Notre Dame game, albeit through an awkward interview, and it made some sense since the rapper is from Detroit and keeps the city close to him and is mentioned in many of his lyrics. Eminem’s team pushed the video debut through his Facebook fan page and Twitterstream.
Either way, football and TV ads are as American as apple pie…and now, so is social media.
Social media and the third screen, which is being incorporated into every aspect of our lives, including sports, is catering to user preference, which includes shifting focus toward user generated content (because users want to be involved), visually stimulating content (who likes reading?), and a way to make content more engaging and two-way (again, people want to interact). So it is no surprise that companies are using the social media outlets and content as much as possible.
When social media first hit the business scene in the mid 2000s, companies were just grasping the idea of what to do with it. Now, companies are seizing opportunities and innovating how they interact and using sports as a platform.
There is sure to be more of this to come…
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