What You Can Learn From Duct Tape & College Football
Time to Read: 2m 20s
Last week, Ohio State University defeated the University of Oregon in the first ever College Football Playoff Championship. As with any major televised sporting event, there were scads of ads played throughout the game, all of them carrying a hefty price tag for those doing the advertising. Those high costs kept countless brands from airing commercials during the broadcast, including many that would surely have been a natural fit for an ad in a football game. However, some savvy companies made up for their lack of advertising funds with clever strategies that got them involved in the game for a fraction of the cost.
Photo credit: JeepersMedia / Foter / CC BY[/caption] Nearly every major event from the game (scoring plays, the second-half kickoff, big penalties, etc.) was recreated by Duck Tape’s social media team. They even invented a few big moments of their own, like a roll shedding its last few inches of tape and “streaking” across the field. Quick-and-dirty, yet effective, stop motion animation brought the action to life. (The real, non-duct tape Buckeyes won the title by over 20 points.) The historic football matchup garnered record ratings for ESPN. Duck Tape’s mini-ads scored 255,000 Facebook impressions, 95,000 plays on Vine, and 75,000 impressions on Twitter. Not bad for a product that, apart from the Duck connection, had no relevance to the game and that is, traditionally, not a player in big-time sports advertising.
Duck Tape vs. Buckeye Tape
Duck Tape duct tape (not a typo) used social media and a whole bunch of tape to create a series of improvised, written-on-the-fly mini-ads for their brand that closely followed the action on the field at AT&T Stadium. The ads, which played out on Duck Tape’s Vine, Twitter, and Facebook pages, used rolls of colored tape as stand-ins for the players on the field—green for the Oregon Ducks, red for the Ohio State Buckeyes, all bearing their respective school’s logo. A triangle of brown tape, complete with drawn on “laces”, was used as the ball; black-and-white striped tape rolls were the refs. [caption id="attachment_3244" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Photo credit: JeepersMedia / Foter / CC BY[/caption] Nearly every major event from the game (scoring plays, the second-half kickoff, big penalties, etc.) was recreated by Duck Tape’s social media team. They even invented a few big moments of their own, like a roll shedding its last few inches of tape and “streaking” across the field. Quick-and-dirty, yet effective, stop motion animation brought the action to life. (The real, non-duct tape Buckeyes won the title by over 20 points.) The historic football matchup garnered record ratings for ESPN. Duck Tape’s mini-ads scored 255,000 Facebook impressions, 95,000 plays on Vine, and 75,000 impressions on Twitter. Not bad for a product that, apart from the Duck connection, had no relevance to the game and that is, traditionally, not a player in big-time sports advertising.