Buffalo Wild Wings is not a Super Bowl advertiser but has a clever plan to chime in on social chatter during the game.
Last week, the brand started asking its Twitter followers to tweet about the NFL playoff games with the hashtag #BWWPostGame for the chance to be featured in a series of social videos that are posted to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Agency Periscope is using social listening tools to pick up on football-related chatter during games that becomes fodder for a series called the Buffalo Wild Wings Post Game Reports.
"Going into the 2015 Super Bowl and the playoffs right now, we want to beef up our live, real-time engagement around these sporting events," said Bob Ruhland, vp of marketing at Buffalo Wild Wings. "It gives us the opportunity to create content—in this case, video—which showcases [social] content that [fans have] provided."
Buffalo Wild Wings will create three videos during the NFL postseason for the divisional conference championship and Super Bowl (you can watch the first one, released Monday, below). A total of 47 tweets are rattled off in two-and-a-half minutes.
As of Wednesday night, the video had been viewed 261,200 times across Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. On Facebook alone, the video had more than 260,000 views, showing how the social network is encroaching on YouTube's territory.
Buffalo Wild Wings is running paid ads on Facebook to get the video into news feeds, but the stats underscore Facebook's rise in becoming a video platform for brands. Also, with more brands ditching expensive in-game TV ads for social media campaigns around the game, the Facebook ads are likely chump change compared to the $4.5 million price tag of a 30-second spot.
"The great thing about digital and social media as it stands today is that it creates an opportunity for people where they can engage with their fan base without spending the kind of money that you had to spend in the past," Ruhland said.