Why Allstate Is Going to Drop an Actual Car Through a Shredder

Pitting college football fans against each other

Allstate's month-long #MayhemTweetOff comes to a crushing conclusion ahead of Saturday's SEC championship game.

Before the Florida Gators and Alabama Crimson Tide take to the field at the Georgia Dome, their supporters will take to Twitter to vote on who's got the better fan base. The winning team will look on as a car, featuring the losing team's logo, is sent through an industrial shredder.

Using Twitter's nascent polling platform, Allstate has produced a #MayhemTweetOff during four recent games. Dean Winters, who plays Allstate's "Mayhem" character, has melted an ice sculpture with the Gators' logo, popped an Arizona State-branded, confetti-filled balloon, and exploded a peach after Georgia Tech fans were outvoted by fans from the University of Georgia.

 

"This idea was to really give fans a way to prove which team has better fans in a very tangible way," Britt Nolan, creative director at Leo Burnett, the agency behind the campaign, told Adweek. The theme of the campaign was designed to remind college football fans to protect themselves from the uncertainties of game-day mishaps.

Voting begins Saturday morning when fans can tweet the hashtag #ShredAlabama or #ShredFlorida. Beginning at 12:30 p.m. ET, a UStream channel will go live showing two conveyor belts set up in Los Angeles and filled with an array of tailgating items from each school. As voting continues, the conveyor belts will drop items through the shredder. At the end of each belt is a car, one of which will meet its crushing end. "These are cars that were actually headed to the shredder anyway," Nolan said.

With the exception of Saturday's championship game—which features banner ad buys on ESPN.com—the #MayhemTweetOff featured no outside advertising, relying instead on social media and the participating schools to get the word out.