by David T on Mon 08 February 2016
How did brands capitalize on their social media campaigns during SuperBowl 50? With one of the largest annual sporting events happening in our backyard this year in San Francisco & Santa Clara, the Spotlyte team couldn't pass up a chance to see how our partners were implementing their social media campaigns at the various SuperBowl events. Of course, we also encountered other great activations as we visited the various SuperBowl locations around the city. So we thought we'd highlight some of these great examples, and maybe some of these will help spark an idea for your next campaign.
The actual SuperBowl itself between the Panthers and the eventual champion Broncos was prefaced with a week long run up of events, festivals, and concerts throughout the Bay Area. Two of the largest activities were SuperBowl City and NFL Experience. SuperBowl City is best described as a week long block party at Justin Herman Plaza in front of the historic Ferry Building, with free concerts and interactive fan exhibits throughout. NFL Experience was a mash up of the NFL Combine and Disneyland where you got to personally experience kicking a game winning field goal, running through an NFL training course, and inspecting each of the last 49 SuperBowl rings. Epic stuff all around for any football fan.
Alright, let's get to some of these campaigns!
One of the first campaigns we noticed at the Moscone center merged some old tech with new tech, TicketMaster combined a tweet call to action to get a chance at one of the tickets in the vending machine. The vending machine is an extremely familiar sight for most people, and combined with the bright branding and call to action was a very visible draw for most attendees.
Over at the NFL experience entrance, dancing life size emojis drew our attention. As we got closer, we realized it was Papa John's running an activation that amplified a social media campaign that they were running throughout the week on their social networks. Papa John's would randomly tweet or post a pizza and football emoji and this would be a signal to fans to reply with a heart emoji and their campaign hashtag to enter a chance to win. An extremely effective campaign, it keeps your fans watching and engaged with your account up to and during the event and drawing. (We're still not sure what that fourth emoji's supposed to be... anyone?!)
At the same booth, Papa John's had another great engaging fan experience. Tossing actual pizzas, and better yet they would take a branded video of you tossing the pizzas. Which we assume would get posted onto your own wall. Unfortunately, lines were too long for us to try it out ourselves! But we got this horribly framed and lighted image to show you ;)
And of course, one of the biggest campaigns itself was the NFL's own #SB50. It was plastered throughout the city, and posted on every SuperBowl image, sculpture, and display. A simple 4 character hashtag ( instead of SuperBowlFifty ). It reminded every fan to use that very simple, easy to use hashtag on all their updates and pictures.
We can only imagine the millions upon millions of posts that were created with the #SB50 all week long!
These were just a few great examples of awesome social media campaigns during SuperBowl 50. Some truly innovative ( vending machine tweets ) and timely ( pizza emojis and sharing video ) campaigns to really engage the fans throughout the week.
Halfway through this blog we realized we had too many great examples to fit into a single post, so we're going to be writing another post later this week with all the other great campaigns that we saw at #SB50. Follow us and stay tuned!