We all know that receivers keep their teams in good hands on the football field, so it only makes sense that the “Good Hands” brand would bring you the Allstate Good Hands Receivers this college football season. So, Allstate took it to the house on Instagram and TikTok and gave sports fans exclusive access to four top-tier college football receivers across conferences, resulting in our best performing social media campaign of the year.
Why would we do this? Our objective was to create a social media activation that leveraged our massive investment in college football to drive brand 💙 (aka awareness + engagement). Oh, but wait, that’s a little harder than it might seem for us. We’re an insurance carrier. Do you want to talk to your insurance carrier about football? Didn’t think so 😉.
Knowing social media users prefer to hear from people that they trust, we strategically partnered with two football influencers, the players, and schools, to create and publish our content. We then used paid media to boost each post for increased awareness. This combination of insightful storytelling and strategic distribution resulted in authentic and positive engagement. And that’s exactly what we wanted.
On November 11, ESPN’s College Game Day analyst Kirk Herbstreit kicked off our series and announced the four players selected as the 2024 Allstate Good Hands Receivers: Emeka Egbuka of The Ohio State University, Tetairoa McMillan of Arizona, Tez Johnson of Oregon, and Luther Burden III of Mizzou. After that, Kirk tossed it over to CFB influencer and up-and-coming football analyst, Max Browne, who engaged our receivers by asking fun, rapid-fire questions giving viewers exclusive information about the players and being a top receiver.
- Target audience: College football fans on social media
- Platforms Utilized: Instagram + TikTok
- Creative Elements:
- 11 total social assets
- 6 “hero” posts, which were boosted and posted in collaboration with players, schools and creators.
- 5 organic “behind-the-scenes” posts. Because we had greater access to the teams and players due to our sponsorship, we could give our audiences more of what they really wanted: insight into their favorite players off-the-field.
- Social creator led: We knew our target audience wasn’t coming to Allstate for football information, but they were following Kirk Herbstreit and Max Browne for all things college football. So, we worked with these influencers to make sure the content we shared was in their voice to appeal to their audience. This resulted in content that felt specific and insightful for our college football fans.
- Seamless Branding: We created Good Hands Receivers gloves for our featured athletes. When the palms of the gloves came together, our Allstate beacon logo was revealed. This was a key creative element of our program because it allowed our branding to show up in an authentic way. Plus, this content was for the internet so our players couldn’t just have a normal interview… they had to catch as many Allstate-branded footballs as possible, all while answering Max’s questions.
- Execution:
- Timeline: Receivers were selected strategically after the season started to see who was going to have a breakout season and be most exciting for our audience. To accommodate this, we started filming mid-late October and went live November 11th through November 21st.
- Challenge: A major challenge was coordinating the packed schedules of four in-season athletes and football analysts, Max and Kirk, who were located across the country. We then had an expedited production timeline so that the content would still be relevant when posted. Lastly, we had to manage 11 brands within the content of this campaign — from Allstate to the schools/athletes to our influencers — all while navigating the complexity of NIL deals in the evolving college athletics landscape.
- Engagement: Over 149K engagements (including 119K clicks!) and 92MM video views. Creator-led strategy proved to be the program’s driving force, achieving 242% higher engagement than brand-drive posts and significantly outperforming Allstate-led content on Instagram. The comments were also all on topic and filled with love for the players and the partnership.
- Reach and Impressions: 98MM impressions
- Performance note: Success of campaign immediately noticed when organic videos were getting 40K views and 2200+ engagements within 30 minutes of being shared (prior to boosting).
