Content marketing — 1980’s style
In the late 1970s, the Pittsburgh-based aluminum manufacturer, Alcoa, had a problem. The energy crisis had hit the US and Alcoa was living in fear of Americans discovering that it used four percent (!) of America’s energy.
“Their fear,” according to the media director of Alcoa’s ad agency, “was that as America waited on gas lines, odd and even days, all that stuff, that people would turn on them. They worried people would say, ‘Wait a minute, let me get this straight: I’m on a gas line at 4 a.m. so you can drink soda out of a can?’”
So, Alcoa decided on a preemptive strike – to make sure people knew the importance of aluminum. The problem is Alcoa had never advertised before and its ad budget was fairly modest. The goal was to reach politicians and other community leaders who had a lot of local influence. It proved to be a difficult group to pinpoint with a media buy. As it turns out, the only place all these people could be reached simultaneously was on Sunday during football games.
Alcoa could have just run a bunch of ads about the glories of aluminum, but instead landed on a sponsorship with the National Football League (NFL) called “Fantastic Finishes.” With two minutes left in every game, there was a timeout on the field and the broadcast cut to a very distinctive trumpet fanfare, followed by a video clip of some amazing finish of an NFL game from the past.
These vignettes ran through the mid 1980s. They had absolutely nothing to do with aluminum, but Alcoa had attached its name to something cool that people found engaging, dramatic, and fun. By the time the vignettes ended in 1986 they had been seen by 2.5 billion people.
The article linked above describes how these vignettes changed the face of television sponsorships and opened up a new world of sponsorship possibilities, and not just in sports marketing. The success of the campaign is also a classic example of how sponsorships can work – the sponsor doesn’t say much, but bathes in the reflected glory of a compelling piece of relevant content.