Chase Utley Rejects Noah Syndergaard Payback Pitch, Fans Reject His Axe Styling Ones
By Don Povia
After watching Los Angeles Dodgers 2B Chase Utley emulate his old buddy Pat Burrell last night and gleefully treat Mets hurlers as BP pitchers, I was a little amused to see a sponsored Tweet pop up in my feed with Mets starter Noah Syndergaard hocking Axe Styling and canoodling with fellow flow-bro Jacob deGrom.
What struck me wasn’t the campaign itself. It seemingly makes sense. Grab a couple of talented, young fireballers with long hair in the world’s largest media market on the defending National League champions and let social media magic do its thing. What struck me is how ineffective it is because of that very thinking.
Two big things social campaigns look to emphasize are authenticity and engagement. Looking at the banter, you see a void of both, despite two huge stars, three days active and paid support behind it.
“You guys get it.” Let’s stop right there. Let’s not pretend Noah or Jacob wrote or even published these tweets themselves, nonetheless had these thoughts.
Even if we put ourselves in a state of suspended disbelief when it comes to digital marketing, who is benefitting from this or similar campaigns? Are the fans, players or brand?
If you look at Syndergaard’s MVP Index ranking, by the numbers, his reach, engagement and conversation are among the best in baseball, top 25, in fact.
A marketer could look at this and justify an investment in the player. What they fail to do, however, is look at what posts resonate with fans and which don’t. And, they fail to accordingly adjust to their campaigns to be more fan-friendly.
Look at Syndergaard’s previous branded campaign with Delta.
Delta might have seen his 117,000 followers, but I can’t imagine they are thrilled with the 0.3% engagement they received from the tweet.
Even when he is promoting his own ventures, when he adds a brand/call to action, the results are dismal.
Conversely, if he complements a teammate, the engagement rate jumps 10.5 percentage points.
Failure, and possibly laziness, by marketers to recognize that tone and voice matter in social is a disservice to the brands they represent, the players they partner with and the fans they are trying to reach.
Per MVP Index, of Syndergaard’s top ten tweets this month, none of them involve a brand. Rather, each mentions a teammate or a pop culture reference.
I don’t blame the players for taking a check. They might as well do so while they can. Eventually, companies are going to wake up and get the joke. Fans have the greatest built in bullshit detectors in the world.
While social campaigns are usually not implemented in a vacuum (though some are), the opportunity they provide to reach fans is unprecedented but underperforming. Creative messaging or implementation hasn’t gotten to where it could and should be across the board. The issue I see is those conducting the campaigns. You either have traditional agencies faking their way into the social age out of the fear of losing client business to more creative or digital-focused agencies. Or you have said digital agencies who fail to connect client business objectives to the creative. Neither has the courage to allow spokespersons to take the keys to the car and let them run the campaigns as they see fit – to speak to their fans the way their fans want to be spoken to. On the media end, outlets are getting that, and you see the models of Vox and Vice with in-house, native advertising capabilities. While athletes don’t have those capabilities themselves, agencies could enable them.