Every Game Is Everything — FOX College Football 2017-2019
We originally worked with Wieden & Kennedy on this for Fall College Football 2017, saw so much success that we continued the tagline for the 2018 and then 2019 (with totally new assets to keep it fresh) seasons. The idea was highlighting passion, intensity, and a little bit of darkness around each matchup of the season, rather than focusing primarily on tentpole events. Every game matters…or Every Game Is Everything.
In College Football you don't have the luxury of looking ahead. Every Saturday is an attack. Each a different way of destroying your season. The biggest game, the only game, is the one you're playing. Every game is everything.
Our campaign objectives were to:
Retain and expand the FOX Sports viewer base by driving engagement and viewership to increase our ratings SOV with College Football while celebrating the addition of the Big Ten conference within our lineup.
Establish FOX and FS1 as a major destination for premium College Football content.
2017 marked the first College Football season that FOX Sports would air the Big Ten Conference in addition to the PAC 12 and Big 12. In order to amplify the occasion, FOX Sports and its AOR, 360i, developed a robust paid media campaign with significant weight supporting the effort across digital and social media.
Our campaign rolled out in 2 phases:
Phase 1: Awareness - We made a dedicated effort to educate CFB viewers that the Big Ten was now on FOX and FOX and FS1 were major destinations for premium CFB matchups.
Phase 2: In-season - We identified key match ups that would showcase the best college football games throughout the season, elevate viewership for each game, and demonstrate FOX's credibility in the space.
Our strategy used a data-driven and very targeted approach across OLV, programmatic, high-impact placements, social and digital, as well as via custom content partnerships to capture the attention of our audience.
We targeted our creative to audiences that included college football fans, Big Ten fans and persuadable "big game" TV viewers. When targeting fans of Big Ten schools, we customized each of our 14 school-specific on-air spots to the digital space - creating excitement with the individual schools intro "sting" to grab the attention of that social user, and stop them in their feed to engage.
We leveraged platforms & partners that allowed for maximum creativity, increased engagement, and capturing the most qualified audience to convert to tune-in. You can view our 14 team-specific spots and our general Anthem spot for the campaign here, to get a sense of their look and feel.
Results
The initial 2017 campaign garnered over 156 million impressions across both phases, which was a very strong number for us at the time. By targeting CFB fans, Big Ten fans and the persuadable CFB fan, we drove tune-in intent and boosted awareness of CFB on FOX.
Using a specific video ad network partner, we were able to measure that those who were exposed to our ads online tuned-in at a significantly higher rate than those that didn't. We were also able to optimize the frequency of these ads to drive down the cost per incremental viewer and proved our overall digital marketing effectiveness.
Our content partnership with USA Today drove over 209% impression delivery via our weekly custom video executions and key matchup high-impact units throughout the season. Social drove an engagement rate that was above industry average, and a high video completion rate Facebook was on par with industry and Twitter outperformed industry benchmarks.
All said and done, College Football on FOX with the addition of the Big Ten Conference was the most watched college football season FOX Sports has ever seen - up 23% in average viewership YoY. And, FOX was also the only network that was up YoY in the College Football segment.
Growing that campaign over time:
The addition of Big Ten Football to our college football portfolio in 2017 was so strong that it led us to build on this idea for several years. After our incredible 2017 season, we attacked 2018 with new digital content franchises, significantly increased involvement from brand partners, and our top TV talent all committing to more digital-exclusive content to continue our cross-platform success. The short of it — our 2018 season numbers were fantastic:
After a rousing 2018, FOX invested in that “Big” idea more than ever in 2019, with the launch of a new weekly studio show, “Big Noon Kickoff” – to go after a Saturday morning show space historically dominated by ESPN’s College Gameday program. We hired some absolutely A-list sports talent to lead our show in Urban Meyer, Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart, and Brady Quinn. Our top game each week now airs in the noon EST slot, so we wanted fans to wake up fired up for FOX Football every Saturday.
This fall, Saturdays start on FOX. Fans no longer have to sit around waiting for primetime to watch big matchups – we’re going to kick things off with a bang each and every week. Our new studio show was accompanied by the launch of ‘Start Saturday Strong’ branding:
College Football on FOX had its most-watched regular season ever, bringing in an average audience of 3,729,000, a +12% increase over the season prior.
FOX’s Big Noon Saturday matchups averaged 5,103,000 viewers each week, led by a regular-season high of 12,501,000 tuning in for Ohio State’s victory over Michigan in Week 14 — the second most-watched game on any network during the regular season.
Additional notes on FOX Sports’ regular season college football viewership are below:
BIG NOON KICKOFF viewership grew by +233% from Week 1 to Week 14
Games on FOX and FS1 accounted for 25% of nation’s college football consumption
Beginning each Saturday with BIG NOON KICKOFF, FOX televised the most-watched college football game at Noon ET nine of 14 weeks
Two of country’s four most-watched regular-season games televised on FOX
No. 2 – Ohio State at Michigan (12,501,000)
No. 4 – Penn State at Ohio State (9,495,000)