The Homa Files

TakeAway: Beer brands want to be top-of-mind when fantasy football managers are pretending to be savvy general managers

MillerCoors has implemented an online platform that will contain a Coors Light interface while the faux manager is on his team page.

And, MillerCoors wants to be involved with all the touch points of a fantasy sports manager, and is now targeting sports blogs.

Well, at least their product will get your mind off the fact that you passed up on Drew Brees. Or it could help you cope with the fact that you aren’t a real GM.

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Excerpted from AdAge, “Coors Light Runs Fantasy Football Advertising Blitz” By Jeremy Mullman, September 14, 2009

Coors Light is betting big on fantasy football.

MillerCoors’ flagship brand, which is the official beer sponsor of the National Football League, is rolling out a raft of new deals in and around fantasy-sports sites for the coming season.

Coors Light had previously had a presence in the sport via NFL.com, but this year it has added a series of new platforms, including deals with WaterCooler, Yardbarker and the Fantasy Sports Ventures network.

The reasons for the marketer’s enthusiasm for the category are twofold: (1) It is convinced that the brand’s core drinkers play the game in droves, and (2) the amount of user data those sites collect gives the brewer a far-greater degree of certainty that it’s ads are being seen by legal-age drinkers, so it won’t have to deal with the sort of backlash that has hounded past online ventures by brewers, such as Anheuser-Busch’s Bud.TV.

How safe? Consider that WaterCooler’s FanSection — a fantasy-football platform that’s integrated into Facebook — is able to use the social network’s user data to determine if players are 21 or older. If they are, they get a version of the game that’s literally coated in Coors, even down to the branded trash-talking modules that accompany game results that are displayed in players’ Facebook news feeds (and, as such, are viewable by all of their friends).

Edit by JMZ

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Full Article
http://adage.com/article?article_id=139005

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This entry was posted on October 6, 2009 at 7:55 am and is filed under Mktg - Promotion, Social Media & Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.