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Brands Celebrate The Return Of Baseball

Baseball is back.
 
It just feels right to type that. The beauty of Opening Day is that all 30 teams and their fan bases begin the season with hope. Anything can happen over the 162-game schedule, and excitement across the game is at its peak before Game 1.
 
As one of MLB’s jewel events, Opening Day is also one of the greatest opportunities for MLB licensing and sponsorship partners to reach fans. And many brands, including MLB itself, pulled out the stops this year. Some highlights: 
 
#CapsOn
 
In a joint effort between MLB and New Era Cap, the fully integrated #CapsOn promotion was one of the most impressive Opening Day campaigns in recent memory. Digital videos and TV spots began running in March encouraging fans to get their “Caps On” this Opening Day. To supplement the excellent creative, MLB Advanced Media partnered with Twitter on a custom hashtag emoji and Snapchat for #CapsOn Geolenses in MLB markets. The lenses, in particular, stand out as a noteworthy extension to the campaign. Even celebrities had fun with them.
For Opening Day itself, MLB and New Era gave out a number of baseball prizes to fans who posted a photo wearing a cap using #CapsOn. The results were impressive, and the orchestrated support from MLB and Club social media channels was especially strong.
 #THIS
 
MLB’s successful #THIS campaign is back for a second season. The new campaign creative highlights the personalities of many of the sport’s biggest and most entertaining stars, including Kris Bryant, Bryce Harper, Andrew McCutchen and Giancarlo Stanton. The humor-based spots do a nice job of dimensionalizing the players as people off the field, and are just a lot of fun.
 
#MLBmemorybank
 
Our client Bank of America rolled out #MLBmemorybank 2.0 for Opening Day. For the second consecutive season, Bank of America will celebrate fan memories and help them create new ones. The brand has released a campaign video and partnered with MLB and its eight partner teams to create social content encouraging fans to share their favorite baseball memories using #MLBmemorybank. Additionally, the Bank is running print creative in Club programs and published a newly designed campaign site at bankofamerica.com/mlbmemorybank. MLB.com media assets are driving to the experience.
 
All season long, Bank of America plans to take advantage of new ways to drive positive favorability among baseball fans, with a focus on producing shareable video content aimed at helping MLB fans create special memories and leveraging new media platforms like Snapchat. 
 
The key to successful Opening Day campaigns is identifying themes that are relevant to fans and building creative around them to add value. All three campaigns referenced above do just that. Play ball!

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