As Super Bowl Week kicks into gear, FOX Sports, which will carry the game on Sunday, hit the weekend with news of its first-ever Agency of Record, lining up a deal to add long-time ESPN partner Wieden+Kennedy New York to its growth plans. The agency will look to “elevate and expand FOX Sports’ brand storytelling and advertising campaigns” via activations across all of the network’s top sports properties and original programming, including FS1’s daily studio shows, with a specific emphasis on the FIFA World Cup on FOX. The partnership is effective immediately.
Cynopsis Sports asked Robert Gottlieb, FOX Sports Executive Vice President, Marketing, about the impact of the deal, marketing the Super Bowl and his plans for Daytona.
Gottlieb on the difficulty of marketing the Super Bowl: While every network handles their marketing differently for the game, for me, this is an event that is easier to promote. There is already awareness and intent-to-view, which are both through the roof. Our strongest indicators are going to be editorial such as game selection. If it’s Cowboys/Patriots, we’ll have more buzz going into it and we’ll see it in the numbers, but the Falcons/Patriots of course is also great because it is played at the Super Bowl. These forces are not affected by marketing so no network can really push that number because there is already so much hype involved.
On changes since FOX’s last Super Bowl: There was a lot of novelty last time because it was in cold weather and it was in New York City, but our approach this time is similar. We had just recently launched FS1 last time, and we looked at the Super Bowl last time as a chance to retrain the spotlight on FS1 and the shows that we had. We are doing that again this time, just a lot smarter and with better shows. We have a lot bigger footprint in Houston than we did in New York City.
On new tech: There are a host of fun new toys and tech that we will be using in our broadcast. At Discovery Green in Houston, the NFL Experience will be there, and we will have a big presence with multiple sets and we have a big 24 VR activation coming. We’ll also have some really cool VR toys that fans can interact with to predict the winners of the game. On social/mobile platforms, the industry is moving at the speed of light and is so significantly different than it was three years ago so we’ll be activating through those including working with Funny or Die on Facebook Live from our site.
On how the Wieden+Kennedy deal came together: It was really fast. I was out talking with some agencies looking for a partner for the World Cup in ’18, and we had previously just done some project work with agencies, which I thought we would do here as well. Shortly after the New Year, I was in conversations when a mutual friend told me to touch base with (Managing Director) Neal Arthur to see where they were at in their deal cycles. We connected and found out that there ESPN exclusivity had lapsed and so we started talking, initially about the World Cup, but it very quickly became apparent that there was a much bigger opportunity here.
On Daytona: We are going to do a massive Daytona Day campaign this year, bigger even than last year. The big different is that last year it was really just a big FOX marketing platform that we were introducing, while this season we will be working very closely with NASCAR, Daytona Speedway and with official NASCAR partner and brands. We’ll have a 60-second spot in the Super Bowl, we are doing another promotion with the Simpsons which we expect to run during the Super Bowl as well promoting Daytona Day. We’ll also have a really big campaign that uses all of our assets across 20th Century Fox.
