With the change of season comes a change in advertising, and fall isn’t just about pumpkin spice. Advertisers are now combining the two major events that mark the beginning to fall to create a marketing boon: The return of the NFL and back to school.
This is a crucial spending season, filled with various companies trying to lure customers with their best deals on products billed as essentials for the school year. But tying in NFL stars, who are also returning to work, is helping increase brand awareness for companies vying for consumer dollars.
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Lenovo and Xbox, for example, launched marketing campaigns featuring favorite NFL players with a twist on going back to school. Lenovo, which launched their campaign in late August, created a fun online video series around a fictional school called “Fantasy Online College,” which pulls in another huge moneymaker in fantasy football, and uses players including Odell Beckham Jr, Eddie Lacy, and Demaryius Thomas "Professor Emerityius" to sell laptops.
Lenovo’s director consumer marketing of North America, Kevin Berman admitted that the company was not blind to the timing of the release of their campaign, with back-to-school buying being top of mind for their content.
“As a brand, we are not taking ourselves too seriously,” Berman said in a news release. “Lenovo products are tools for fun, and the brand is intentionally minimized by the on-screen talent. We wanted to play off the fact that while fantasy football is a serious business these days, in the end, it’s still a game, one that’s become integral to promoting the league to a new, younger group of fans in every NFL city.”
The series, which can be seen on YouTube, will also be featured on NFL.com and SBNation throughout the NFL season, supported on social media through the company and its sponsored players, and be tied to experiential giveaways of their products.
So far, Lenovo’s partnership with the NFL has proven successful. Lenovo, which has been an NFL sponsor since 2012, has increased its brand awareness among fantasy football players by 32 percentage points, and is currently ranked as a $46 billion global Fortune 500 company in the consumer technology space.
Xbox brought back their brand ambassadors from last season, Saints quarterback Drew Brees and Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch, to create a commercial clip about fantasy football set in a college-style lecture classroom. Known as “Game Day Evolution 101,” the campaign includes Brees, Lynch, as well as Packers linebacker Clay Matthews III and Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman.
Throughout the commercial, Xbox plays off of its sponsored talent, showing Sherman, a Stanford grad, as a studious participant, as well as having Lynch sneak in at the end of the commercial saying, “I’ve been here the whole time,” playing off of his SuperBowl Media Day interview.
Like Lenovo, Xbox proves to be spot on with using the NFL’s star power to increase brand awareness, garnering 40 percent of the overall share of voice in the videogame ad category, and the most-engaging ad overall in the last week of August.
This video from the NFL on Xbox series, for instance, has more than 3 million views:
The NFL is a highlight for millions of people as fall approaches, and it’s no wonder that companies like Xbox and Lenovo are investing their spending to tie football fandom to a $68 billion dollar consumption market with back-to-school. The true hook lies in the fact that although these companies are trying to drive sales for a particular new product, (in this particular interest Lenovo and Xbox are driving their consumers to use fantasy football on their devices) they are ultimately creating an environment for brand loyalty for not only the back-to school students, but also their parents.