MP: So much of corporate social media follows a set formula, and fans are sharp enough to know when they’re being fed a formulaic product, with corporate messaging points wedged into post, or daily posts that tick a box. Tell me a little bit about how you’ve been empowered to express your creativity and what that means in what your team posts.
DO: The vision set by our leadership is to grow our audience, authentically. And this is a business, but you have push and pull marketing. Corporate marketing pushes predetermined messages to an audience. But when you develop a content strategy, you must pull people in with content that makes them care. When I arrived, we were only covering races, very clinically. There was no nod to sports car fans, broader car culture, creators – so we knew there was opportunity. Then we began experimenting and you can experiment as long as the performance justifies it.
Earlier I mentioned pent-up demand and as we did more race highlights, Art of the Pit Stop, Shop Tours, and so on, the viewers told us exactly what they liked and why – and they also told us what they did not like. For example, we noticed a lot of comments complaining about music. Rob Hunt, our digital content manager, had the idea to remove literally all audio except the cars, and those are some of our best per-forming videos and an obvious sponsorable opportunity for an audio company!
Before I returned to sports, there was a period where I was creating strategy and content for Bounty paper towels and Pringles at the same time. You’d have a Monday content meeting for Bounty, where it was like, “Okay, what are we going to post this week?” Every week you’d come in and that meeting could be tough because you’d say, “Okay, let’s think outside the box,” but there’s only so many places to go with it. And it was just excruciating.
And then on the flip side, the first content strategy I wrote for Pringles was at the other side of the agility spectrum. We went out and did some quick research on what’s already happening, and we realized that people were collecting these cans because there were 300 flavors of Pringles. Nobody knew that. And it’s just different salts on a chip, right?
So they have special flavors like they had crab-flavored Pringles, but you it was only sold in Japan. And we’re like, “Oh… we can go all kinds of places with this.” So we developed a layered content strategy where we were showing peoples can collections and showing how they were trading them in different parts of the world. And then there was a DIY group that was making a carburetor for their Jeep out of a Pringles can, or a stereo speaker for their dorm room out of a can.
So the can had a life of its own, and we just leaned into that, that culture of creativity, and we grew that account from 12 million followers to 24 million followers in a year, just off of organic content. And so that was a big first lesson for me, which I tell the team today, “Don’t think so hard, you can have fun, you can be creative.”
And then you get to sports… Sports is a cheat code for marketing because it’s really just entertainment, You’re not selling potato chips or paper towels — you’re not selling anything. You’re just capturing what’s happening in the sport, in the moment, as entertainment. So, the content is built in and you don’t have to sit in a meeting every Monday morning to decide, “What are we going to post this week?”
Because our reality is, things are happening all around us, like, “Look, there’s 40 Lamborghini Huracan Super Trofeo cars lining up for tech inspection – capture it!” Or, “Look, there’s a rare Mustang in the parking lot outside our offices, let’s go down and capture it!”
We’ll go out with a couple of iPhones. We’ll shoot it, we’ll post it. It’s so much easier in sports when you have cars to play with like we do. That’s why brands and partners activate in sports; they can be included instantly in compelling content outside their normal channels.
To give an outside example from when I worked in the NBA, we had the players’ personalities, the team’s popularity, and how they were doing on the court as foundations for content creation. But there was also the lifestyle side of it and understanding, “How do you tap into people’s emotions?,” because they’re such fans of what you’re providing, and they’re aching for acknowledgment. At the San Antonio Spurs, we would look for fans that were unique and special. Then we’d like their posts, or we would comment on their posts, and they would just flip out and share it with everybody. So there’s “a-ha” moments where you’re creating brand equity and developing a relationship that is so personal that nothing else can touch it.
And it’s easy. You know, it doesn’t take very long. You can even block out a half-hour a week and just go like a bunch of posts that you see, and you’ve just made so many people’s days.