Even if you’re nowhere near Houston for the NCAA championship showdown between the UNC Tar Heels and the Villanova Wildcats tonight, AT&T is ensuring that it is “mobilizing your world.”
The telecom giant — an official corporate partner of the NCAA — is teaming up with a handful of Snapchat and Vine influencers to give fans a behind-the-scenes look at all the frenetic activity around the Final Four, both on and off the court. It is working with MKTG agency Team Epic and influencer agency Delmondo for this push, which is a part of its bigger campaign #GameOn promoting AT&T-owned DIRECTV’s streaming service.
Snapchat artists Evan Garber and Mike Metzler as well as Hawaiian basketball freestyler Kalani Ahmad among others, have been churning out content from Houston in the the run-up to the final tonight. Some of these also feature appearances by basketball stars Shaquille O’Neal and Scottie Pippen as well as musicians including Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco. So far, the campaign has driven more than a million views on Snapchat alone.
In one clip for instance, Ahmad spins two balls as Scottie Pippen watches, before passing one of the balls to him.
Spinning it with @ScottiePippen, thanks to @ATT. #GameOn #ad https://t.co/2dP3mi1Juz
— KalaniBallfree (@KalaniBallFree) April 2, 2016
In another clip from the weekend, influencer Frank Danna is shown dancing around Houston’s Discovery Green, waiting for Fall Out Boy to perform.
Dance, dancin’ around Discovery Green waiting for @falloutboy. Tune in tonight https://t.co/WNQNgRpizv #ad https://t.co/03usHyAxgI
— Frank Danna (@erskine) April 1, 2016
In a third, stop-motion Viner Jack Bethmann delivers a panorama of Houston’s NRG stadium.
AT&T is circulating this content across its social properties, including Twitter and Facebook. But it is also cutting it together as a reel to be broadcast as branded content on the stadium’s Jumbotron — becoming the first national brand to integrate Snapchat content into a major sporting event in this way. A similar reel was already broadcast during the Final Four games on Saturday, between UNC and Syracuse and Villanova and Oklahoma.
Early last year, AT&T created a Snapchat scripted series called “SnapperHero,” starring a bunch of YouTube, Vine, Instagram and Snapchat influencers, such as Freddie Wong and Harley Morenstein and Anna Akana.
AT&T is also trying to cultivate its own in-house stable of social media stars. As Digiday reported earlier, it is teaming up with YouTube network Fullscreen to launch AT&T Hello Lab, a new program aimed at helping social video stars create all sorts of content regularly — instead of specific AT&T campaigns or another.
“Today’s influencer-brand relationships are too transactional in nature,” said Valerie Vargas, vp of advertising and marketing communications at AT&T. “We want to flip that on its head by making a long-term commitment to the community.”
-
TikTok’s uncertain future: the issues marketers should (and shouldn’t) fret over
A TikTok ban would require U.S. lawmakers to prove that the short-form video app is a genuine national security risk. So far, that hasn’t happened.
-
Maybe Web3 isn’t as dead as it would seem, as agencies play with new data-generating models
Agencies are continuing to invest in Web3 technologies in new ways, from client activations to data management.
-
Why real estate company Windermere is adding influencers to its marketing mix and spending half of its ad budget on them
Windermere is working with Seattle-based agency PB& as well as the home-focused publication Domino to partner with influencers like design influencer Max Humphrey.
-
SponsoredHow critical data pillars will increase brands’ confidence in CTV
Mario Diez, CEO, Peer39 With every quarter, the balance of TV viewership slips away from the traditional linear model and more towards connected TV. Less than half of the adults in the U.S. subscribe to cable or satellite, and fewer than half of the households watched linear TV daily in the second half of 2022. […]
-
Digiday+ Research: Agencies’ attitudes on secondary social platforms have seen ups and downs (especially on Twitter)
Digiday+ Research surveyed over 100 agency professionals, and found that agency clients' approach to the channels categorized as "other social platforms" has been somewhat erratic over the last year.
-
Why DOOH is a big draw for startups and direct response marketers
As digital ad channels, like social and paid search, become saturated and data privacy gets more restricted, startups and small businesses turn to DOOH to boost brand awareness.
