W+K New York isn’t the only agency that’s been focused on football recently — and for good reason.
Not only is the NFL about to start things up again, but this year’s college football season will be the first in history to discard the traditional Bowl Championship Series for a true four-team seeded playoff.
The first spot in W+K’s new campaign to promote client ESPN’s college coverage casts fandom as a universal experience…something everyone has “in common”:
A second :15 spot, which also debuts today, highlights some possible shakeups in the world of collegiate pigskin: will the new format allow an underdog to win the day?
W+K New York has a new campaign for ESPN, promoting the network’s coverage of college football and stoking fans’ excitement for the first year of the college football playoffs.
The campaign, entitled “Who’s In?” will run from the start of the season until a National Champion is crowned in January. “Different Ways In” (featured above), the campaign’s debut spot, launches today across ESPN’s networks and digital properties. Narrated by Burt Reynolds, the 60-second spot manages to cram in references to 20 different schools, as well as cameos from Jerry Jones, Jimmy Kimmel, Urban Meyer, Les Miles, Sam Bradford and JJ Watt. That’s not a bad way to stoke excitement from fans of different schools for the FBS College Football Season on ESPN, which begins Wednesday, August 27. Stick around for credits after the jump. (more…)
Sean Astin reprises his role as Rudy in a new spot W+K New York created to hype the new college football playoff format for ESPN.
In the spot, Astin apes his inspirational speech from Rudy, this time riling up the locker room with the promise of a playoff format for college football. When he reveals that the format won’t take effect until 2014 however, the reception falls somewhat flat. Filmed at St. Joseph High School in Brooklyn, New York, the spot takes place in 1975, the year Rudy Ruettiger played for Notre Dame. While the famously cheesy movie certainly deserved a satirical send up, W+K’s spot fails to really hit the mark and feels a bit drawn out at 90 seconds. Stick around for credits after the jump. (more…)
W+K and Heineken’s initial “social experiment” (sorry guys, no, this is a marketing campaign) “Departure Roulette” set about to send travelers at JFK Airport on a free trip to a new destination — one that they didn’t know of in advance.
Operating under the assumption that “Heineken consumers are especially open to adventure and the unknown” (and pissy-tasting beer), Heineken and W+K chose to follow-up by finding enthusiastic fans of the initial campaign in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York and bring the Departure Roulette board to them with “Departure Roulette En Route.” These were fans who tweeted that they would love to be given the opportunity to play Departure Roulette, so it was a fair assumption that they would accept the challenge.
Surprised but delighted to be given the opportunity to press the red button and set off for destinations unknown, most seemed excited at their travel prospects. One dude didn’t know where Reykjavik is, which is kind of lame, since I would club baby seals to be given the opportunity to travel to Iceland. Someone else appears to not have been home. (They must be kicking themselves for that one.) Another guy seemed less than elated to be going to Romania, with a reaction something along the lines of “Romania? Okay, I guess I’m going to Romania.” I guess he would have preferred Disney World or something. Maybe that “open to adventure and the unknown” assumption wasn’t so accurate.
This is a really interesting campaign from W+K. The original premise was a cool idea, and the follow-up engaging fans who claimed they’d love to participate makes a lot of sense; and taking things outside of the airport really raises the bar on the spontaneity factor. Wasting a perfectly good chicken parm, though? Not so cool. Credits after the jump.
ESPN’s latest W+K New York-created spot for SportsCenter is a bit of a departure from their usual advertising style. In the 1:01 spot, ESPN spotlights their trade mark “da da da” (you’ll know it when you hear it) spoken by a wide range of athletes (such as Maria Sharapova, Bubba Watson, RG III, Clayton Kershaw and Patrick Kane) in different situations.
Not centered around a comic premise, “DaDaDa DaDaDa” lets the highlights from many different sports, including ones you don’t care about (lacrosse, anyone?), do the talking for a majority of the spot — perhaps not a bad strategy (except for the lacrosse), considering that is why most people tune in to SportsCenter.
“Da Da Da” is also a departure in that it’s the first ESPN commercial in ten years to be shown on other networks, such as during NBC’s Sunday Night Football. Presumably a response to SportsCenter’s declining audience — and perhaps a reaction to new competitor Fox Sports 1 — the spot attempts to bring in new viewers by running on DirectTV, Adult Swim, Spike and Comedy Central. Whether or not the expensive spot can help SportsCenter fight the declining viewership brought on by the increased ease of finding sports highlights online remains to be seen. But lacrosse players everywhere are cheering. Credits after the jump.
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