Snapple Sponsors Yahoo Sports' 'Out of Bounds'

Yahoo Sports/Snapple

Dr Pepper's Snapple Group this week launches a promotional tie-in with Yahoo Sports around the latter's new humorous video series, "Out of Bounds." The series on the Yahoo Sports home page offers a comedic take on professional and amateur sports along the lines of "Primetime in No Time (PiNT)," Yahoo's long-running TV recap Webcast. In fact, the new sports series is hosted by PiNT's former host, comedian Frank Nicotero.

One of the inaugural video's featurettes has Nicotero Photoshopped into the Tiger Woods press conference last week. He seems to be seated next to Woods' mom, where he asks Woods questions and gets inscrutable answers, while making fun of Woods' clothing and his apology. The show also mocks the Olympics and Mark McGuire's first day in spring training.

Erika Nardini, vice president of brand packaging at Yahoo, says Verizon was the partner for the last season of PiNT, while JC Penney sponsors spinoff "Daytime in No Time."

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Yahoo developed the program with Snapple. "Our sports editors have always wanted to do this show; what we wanted to do was work in concert with a brand," she says.

Snapple underwrites the show as part of its media buy and partnership with Yahoo, per Nardini. who adds Yahoo's "Sport Minute" recap averages 2 million to 2.5 million streams per month, although it garnered 6 million streams, thanks to the Super Bowl.

"It's huge for Snapple," she says. "They become exclusively associated with very compelling, highly promoted original content -- built for them -- that will be featured very often on Yahoo's front page. We are driving a fire hose of audience to view these episodes."

Snapple gets integration into the set and other elements of the show, as well as ad adjacency both within the "Out of Bounds" window and next to it. "And they are using [the sponsorship] to drive their own social-media strategy. They become inextricably linked with premium content in front of a very relevant audience," she adds.

The first run of the show is for six months, with new content airing once per week, per Nardini, who suggests that it may be a tall order to predict "Out of Bounds" will do as well as PiNT, which has garnered some 300 million streams -- Yahoo's most successful Web show to date.

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