NBC SPORTS’THANKGIVING SIDE DISH BOWL
At the intersection of sports design & social engagement.
It went live, and it went big. Seen on NBC’s “Today” for their pre-Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and articles picked up on Variety, Uni-Watch, and others, the social engagement numbers were even better then we could have imagined. We have to be a little fuzzy on the numbers, but publicly it is easy to say that it likely reached somewhere around 8 -10 million people in 4 days, roughly 200K engagements, and a potential impact range of around 40 million.

When NBC and The Barn came up with the idea of the Side Dish Bowl (definitely a team effort) for a social media engagement campaign around Thanksgiving we never thought it would grow to what it did. When an idea and creative is “so strong” that NBC wants to produce them and “blow it up” your agency flies pretty high for a while. But at the onset of the project, The Barn was very adamant about a couple of things about the campaign.
- Find the balance of fun and serious. Fun was going to be the easy part. Immediately thinking of crazy brands for minor league baseball, but football is almost always serious. Even in college, with mascots like Turkeys and Trees, football is always a serious affair.
- Believable. We could ways slap a picture of whatever food on a jersey. We could come up with wacky designs that no one has ever seen before…. The Barn wanted to make logos and uniforms that fans might actually think could and should be real. Designs that could actually be produced.
- Push the design. Treat this like any of our other sports brands, and try to make something better than expected. How do we make a green bean casserole sports brand nostalgic? How do we pull visual elements from the canning process of Cranberry sauce into the uniforms? Never settle.