Here at PR Return, we’re big college football fans (#GoBlue); so as summer winds down, we find solace in the excitement of fall weekends spent watching our favorite teams grind it out on the gridiron. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic still raging, many college athletic conferences have decided to postpone or outright cancel fall sports, including college football.
As Advertising Age points out, “The move would disrupt the fall marketing calendars of dozens of brands, from beers and sodas to automakers and insurance marketers, that rely on the sport's reach to capture coveted audiences.”
The popular American pastime of college football drew more than $1.5 billion in advertising in 2019, according to Kantar Media, with the top five spenders being AT&T, Allstate, Dr Pepper, State Farm and Chick-Fil-A.
While we may be spending our Saturdays weeping over the absence of college football this fall, marketers have been stacking their playbooks with other scenarios to adapt to this prospect. Just as many marketers had to shift plans for an unprecedented back-to-school season, brands once again find themselves pivoting to create more flexible campaigns in lieu of targeting the captive college football audience.
Heineken USA-owned beer brand, Dos Equis, for example, will not change media buys, but adjust its strategy to implement more product-focused advertisements in place of its existing college football-focused campaigns.
Early on in the pandemic, Anheuser-Busch announced it would redirect its sports and entertainment investments to its non-profit partners during the COVID-19 health crisis.
Live sports were one of the first mainstays of “everyday” life to come to a grinding halt at the start of the pandemic and have since slowly and selectively made their way back. During these last several months, marketers have had to repeatedly rethink strategy and shift messaging to consumers as we enter new buying seasons and different challenges arise.
Whether benching some media plans or subbing in with new campaigns, marketers must keep their playbooks ready to make the right call as they continue to navigate the changes brought on by the pandemic.