The Smashmouth Guide to Making Sports Events Work for Your Brand

Championship-level strategies

In today’s media cycle, sports never end. Seasons are stretched out as much as possible to maximize revenue, which means there’s always a game to see, a team to follow or a commercial to watch. The 12-month sports grind doesn’t just hit the players hard—it also wears down consumers, who end up sitting through the same ads from the same brands, over and over. So how do advertisers defend against viewer fatigue?

Luckily, today’s advertisers have more channels available for distributing their work than ever before, and even though some brands are producing nuanced cross-channel campaigns tailored for sports fans, they still risk losing out to overexposure or too much competition. Per Adobe research, today’s marketers are expected to “optimize content for 2.5 times as many channels as they did last year.” Of course, no marketer wants to waste budget on media that gets lost in the cracks. For those marketers looking to dominate cross-channel marketing to sports audiences, there’s a path to victory that can be easy to overlook: one-time events.

The Olympics, football championship games, title boxing matches—these one-off events are huge opportunities for marketers looking to break through the cycle of monthly reach that can sack even the best-intentioned branding efforts. Why? Because storylines for these primetime sporting events are fresh and in demand, which makes it much easier to cut through the noise and get people’s attention.

Tecate, for example, took advantage of the incredible hype in April and May surrounding a big title boxing match with a cross-channel campaign that drove about $30 million in brand exposure during the fight. The beer company had to pay a heavyweight fee of $5.6 million to win the main sponsorship rights, but in addition to logo visibility, Tecate also unleashed a promotional YouTube series featuring a boxing commentator and a celebrity actor with boxing appeal. The series racked up millions of views and integrated consumer engagement on Twitter with #MyBoldOpinion, helping Tecate pack a punch on multiple channels.

A few months before the bout, there was another sporting event primed with cross-channel potential: football’s Big Game. Wix, a platform for building websites, created a commercial for #ItsThatEasy, a cross-channel game plan that poked fun at fictional businesses that retired football players could start. The clip drew widespread acclaim, and Wix took it a step further by actually producing microsites for each celebrity spokesman and blasting out the satire on social media.

As the company’s CMO told Marketing Land, “Part of our vision was a … campaign—not [a] spot.” The distinction is important: Marketers and viewers alike tend to get caught up in the cost of airtime for a single commercial during a big game, but Wix’s multifaceted strategy not only led to brand exposure, but also helped boost the company’s stock forecast.

According to eMarketer, however, 62 percent of marketers “worry that their messaging is not integrated across touch points.” That gap suggests a serious disconnect between what marketers want to do and what they’re capable of doing. But that doesn’t have to be the case. To succeed with cross-channel campaigns, marketers need to capitalize on the most sought-after stages in sports. Some will continue to play it safe during the typical sports cycle, but for those looking for an edge, advertising during the biggest one-off events in sports could be the key to winning over new customers.

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