College football, New York Times

The Classic PR Stunt: Will Farrell and The Trojans…

So often the 24/7 sports world we live in leaves little to the imagination, and many times those looking to spin and create new ideas get caught up in the news cycle and the creativity gets lost.  Hence the lack of effective Heisman campaigns or awards promotions for athletes in most sports.  However sometimes the worlds of sport and entertainment collide for a great stunt, such as the one pulled off with USC football coach Pete Carroll and comedian Will Farrell this week.  Yahoo Sports has a great look inside the stunt, which had many of the Trojans on the field at the time totally fooled, and took someone with a sense of timing, and a coach as open-minded as Carroll, to pull off. It was a great example of a brand using a key motivator in its universe (Farrell being a Trojan fan) to come up with an event that attracted great media attention, tied the brand to a larger audience outside of sports and gave those casual fans a look inside a football dynasty that they normally wouldn’t get.  Great points for USC, great example to set for other programs.

Some other good reads…The Eye on Sports Media blog has a really good look into the CBS Sports site branding issues and how they can be solved…pretty insightful…on the extreme side, USA Today has a look at Slamball’s return to TV, while the New York Times has a piece on Ken Harvey and his idea for space age “Floatball”…and Brandweek.com has a pretty important read on the amount of consumers who now use social media…