3 Ways the NFL is Enhancing Fan Engagement with Intelligent Creative

By : Cecilia Ward

11/18/21

Learning how to deliver the right message at the right time for the right audience is challenging no matter what industry you are in, but over the last couple of years through optimizing its creative assets, the National Football League (NFL) has been a leader in this technological revolution.

Although 70% of a campaign’s performance is rooted in its creative assets according to Google’s Marketing Live conference in 2019, it is difficult to fully take advantage of this as creative quality, consistency, and compliance are constantly changing. However, by analyzing the NFL’s creative performance to optimize their campaigns, the organization was able to radically improve their community engagement, with increases in engagement and click-through rates by 262% and 107%, respectively, according to creative produced by VidMob compared to the NFL & Teams FaceBook Account Averages.

Moving away from the traditional “one size fits all” methodology of creative to a motivation-driven, customizable creative has allowed the NFL to refocus on its main goal of how to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.

By melding data and technology with creativity in an intelligent way to discover what works the best for their brand’s strategy, the NFL has optimized the performance of its creative assets to allow them to understand what is happening in real-time for a given campaign.

Here are three takeaways of the NFL’s gameplan to enhance fan engagement:

Discovering New Platforms

After this unusually challenging phase year, the NFL sought to welcome new and die-hard fans back with open arms in the safest and healthiest way possible. To enhance engagement with a diverse range of fans, the NFL discovered they needed to adapt to their fans’ terms by utilizing new, digital platforms to market and distribute content. They have successfully done so through increasing access to streaming services, partnerships, and airing on more networks.

Bringing communities together

As a cultural cornerstone in the U.S., the NFL feels that it has a responsibility to bring their fans, who range from every corner of the country and every age group, together.

“It is as important to us to be relevant culturally within different disciplines as it is within sports and entertainment largely,” said Joshua Rabenovets, Vice President of Marketing Strategy, Performance & Technology at the NFL.

In order to best meet their consumers’ needs, the NFL has found ways to employ different assets to deliver captivating narratives which are relevant to their wide range of fans.

Moving to a motivation-driven methodology

Rather than solely focusing on past behaviors, the NFL has been turning to analyze the motivations in order to create the best possible experience for their fans.

“Ensuring that we have the right assets, the right creative, the right message, and the right channels for those different audiences is a monumental task, and that is a large part of why we’ve leaned on VidMob,” Rabenovets explained.

 

Access the full conversation between VidMob Founder and CEO Alex Collmer and Joshua Rabenovets, VP of Marketing Strategy, Performance & Technology at the NFL here.