Hebrew National Strikes While The Sanchez Dog Is Hot…

October 29, 2009 by Joe Favorito · 2 Comments 

Timing is everything, whether you are an official team partner or not. Take Conagra Foods Hebrew National Hot Dogs for example. The Kosher Dog, with a few professional sports ties but not many, made a very smart play this week to tie to the Jets, the NFL and poster boy quarterback Mark Sanchez by capitalizing on the shots of Sanchez munching on a hot dog on the sideline during Sunday’s romp over the Oakland Raiders. In honor of the on-camera hot dog sneak, Hebrew national announced today a plan of free hot dogs for anyone holding a ticket to any professional football game this season (hello UFL) where a quarterback is caught on camera eating a hot dog. The announcement strikes home for many reasons. One it is a great ambush marketing play for a brand which is more regional than national and usually doesn’t get national exposure, especially even remotely tied to a professional sports brand. Second it is set up so that the chances of a mega-giveaway are slim, but if the viral nature of the offer gets out and there is a quarterback and a cameraman smart enough to catch the sneak during a broadcast, the exposure will fare outweigh the cost. Third, it is perfectly worded to avoid any mention of NFL team, so as not to infringe upon any rights, and fourth, it is a great example of a brand making light of an incident which probably was taken way to seriously anyway. Now will a team take advantage? Could a college or minor league brand up the challenge? Will Hebrew National be prepared for a deluge should the challenge play out? All to be seen. Regardless of the outcome, the brand beat the competition to the bunch and added in a nice PR spin, as captured in the New York Post and other places Wednesday. Good old fashioned spinning in a time when brands are always looking for the unique, cost efficient brand.

Will College Athletics Lead Or Follow? Depends On The Leader

June 17, 2009 by Joe Favorito · Leave a Comment 

A few weeks ago we touched upon the great opportunity that college athletic departments of all sizes have in these troubled financial times to learn, become more business-like and show true value as community leaders to the students and the institutions they represent. Still the troubles continue ahead, as instead of investing and learning the business of sports, more colleges are looking to cut around the edges and find ways to slow the process of media relations and athletic branding down, rather than taking steps to grow through investment, a practice which certainly is taught in the classrooms of any basic history or economics class. The blog “Eye On Sports Media” recently had a great piece on the NCAA ruling to basically ban media guides as both a cost savings and a way to eliminate the evils of recruiting violations, thus giving casual media covering colleges the risk of getting information only through a higher tech application, like a CD-rom. Now is it smart to cut back on wasteful printing? Absolutely, and printing should be a Title IX must for schools, it should be a necessity for sports that get adequate media coverage. The frills are also not needed in making media guides vanity projects either…they should be what they were created for…to service the media. But the reckless elimination of such guides will probably hurt coverage in the long run at the risk of saving a few short term bucks. Stupid. Now let’s take a look at the positive side, which is contained in the announcement of new University of Houston athletic director Mack Rhodes. Rhodes, going to the Cougars from the University of Akron, made a strong positive impression in his introductory presser, setting a tone not as a budget slasher but as a revenue generator, looking at the U of H as a part of the community that needs to embrace and be more business-like in the way it can grow and identify with the community around it. It not just sends the right message to the staff and partners in Houston, but it conveys a message as a leader for all of college athletics no matter what the size. You have a brand, invest and treat it like the commodity it is, go find the projects that can bring in a quality experience for new partners who can appreciate college athletes and show value, and your brand will grow. The smartest brands find cost-efficient ways to invest in the leanest of times, and colleges should be no different.