I’m a football fan, bleeding green with my beloved Philadelphia Eagles, but let’s be honest here: NFL schedule release day is boring.
Last week, the NFL and their teams released their schedules for the upcoming season as they always do: slowly but surely leaking games throughout the day before the full schedule goes public in the evening.
They have it down to a science, driving ESPN’s programming throughout the day by enticing analysis of key matchups, holiday games, and primetime opportunities. Despite all of that, schedules are boring and the season is still more than 3 months away. As a fan, the schedule makes me more annoyed than anything knowing I still have to wait for the season to get underway.
HOWEVER, some teams take the schedule release to the next level. They take this boring information dump of teams, dates, and times, turning it into content that brings in not just their fanbase, but fans across the league.
Enter the Tennessee Titans and the Los Angeles Chargers.
First and foremost, these teams know their audiences. Tennessee fans certainly get a kick out of the many tourists that cluelessly wander about Broadway in Nashville. Chargers fans expect quality production value, being in Los Angeles, and the team certainly didn’t disappoint in that category – as well as in the comedic pieces of each cut in the video – the Miami Dolphins coach vape scandal from last season, Detroit Lions players being suspended for gambling, Aaron Rodgers’s stint in a dark isolation room to decide his path forward.
These teams took the information available to them, their knowledge of what makes their fanbase unique, and turned a schedule release into pure gold. The numbers don’t lie – most of the team’s tweets average somewhere around 100,000 views, but these are now both well over 20 million views, tens of thousands of retweets and near or over 100,000 likes.
These videos are marketing in its purest form: speak to your audience and turn something boring into something you can’t stop watching.
P.S. My Eagles really leaned into their Dog Mentality.