In the US sports marketing world, late October and early November seemed to be dominated by one name – LeBron James.
His homecoming story certainly provided a powerful narrative to promote the new NBA season and a huge number of big brands leveraged the story.
But not all his promotional work was based around big budget, emotional blockbuster campaigns from giant global brands (such as Beats, Nike and Sprite) running for several weeks across multiple platforms
LeBron also led some snappy, low-cost, timely promotions – such as his sponsored social media ‘Halloween Tweet’ work for Progressive.
Everyone dresses up on Halloween in the USA and even image conscious LeBron is no exception.
This year he wore a costume in the style of the fictional character ‘Flo’ from the long-running Progressive Insurance ad campaigns – complete with long-haired wig – and shared it on his Facebook page wishing everyone a happy Halloween.
The superstar player was mimicking the well-known fictional commercial front-woman.
Indeed, there is a long tradition of dressing up as Flo for Halloween – to the extent that in 2012 a spin-off spot was created specifically on that theme
This snapshot piece of paid social promotion for Progressive seemed somewhat inevitable after the Cleveland Cavaliers star tweeted out his admiration for the brand’s ‘Flo’ character despite having a sponsorship deal with rival State Farm at the time.
The single post alone racked up 372,000 Likes and nearly 19,000 shares and it gained huge unearned media coverage too.
But it seems likely that this simple, single selfie tweet is the start of a wider new campaign by LeBron and Progressive.
Various reports suggest that it is the prelude to a new digital-first campaign that Progressive is calling ‘The Switch’ which will activate across social channels.
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This may simply be a teaser for a bigger brand campaign, but even a single branded tweet from LeBron can be a powerful engagement tool in itself.
After all, his own personal media channels certainly have impressive reach.
He has 22m Facebook Likes and boasts 16m Twitter Followers
Impressive numbers for an athlete who, just a few years ago, was seen by many as one of the most hated men in sports.
Now Lebron James’ rehabilitation is complete (well, as far as the marketers are concerned anyway).
Forbes has announced that he has overtaken Tiger Woods as the biggest active brand in sports (in terms of the combined value of endorsements (although many argue that Michael Jordan, despite retiring in 2003, still pulls in more).
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