beverages

Snapple Launches Promo With Yahoo Sports

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 lambastes the Olympics, and Mark McGuire's first day in spring training.

advertisement

advertisement

Erika Nardini, VP 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."

She tells Marketing Daily that 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 says the show was built on the insight that Yahoo audiences enjoy recap programming. "We know they are also passionate sports fans, and there's a comedic angle [in sports programming] we saw as underserved."

Per Nardini, Yahoo's "Sport Minute" recap averages 2-2.5 million streams per month, though she says last month because of the Super Bowl and other sports news, it garnered 6 million streams.

"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."

She adds that Snapple gets integration into the set and other elements of the show, and 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. If I had to encapsulate: it bridges pop culture and sports in a way that directly involves Snapple."

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, is Yahoo's most successful Web show and is probably the most successful Web program to date.

"The number of enthusiasts for humorous sports news and bloopers is probably less than that of, say, J. Lo tripping during the Grammys, but there's no reason not to suspect we can drive traffic. It's not just about fire hose and scale -- it's really about programming that resonates strongly, in conjunction with [the right] brand."

Next story loading loading..