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May 19, 2023

Editor Note: Adam Grossman takes the controls on Friday mornings. You will find his latest Revenue Above Replacement column is below. I'll be back on Monday. Have a great weekend.

Titans Show Organic Content Can Drive Outsized Fan Engagement

The NFL schedule release has become a marquee event on the league calendar.

It quenches the fans' thirst for football between the Draft and training camp, and serves as the catalyst for networks to select games, for teams to sell tickets, hospitality packages and partnerships, and for gaming operators to set lines. 

Most teams produce content around their respective schedule's release. 

The Tennessee Titans were no exception. The club put out a highly produced video befitting of the tentpole occasion.

Excel Analytics found the video generated a projected 1.28 million aggregate impressions (video views and post impressions) across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. 

However, the team also put out a secondary video featuring members of its social media team conducting interviews with Broadway (Nashville) patrons.

Participants were shown the logos of the Titans 2023 opponents and were asked to identify the teams. Few knew the corresponding names or cities. 

But instead of simply saying they didn't know, many made incorrect –if logical– guesses. For example, one woman speculated the Atlanta Falcons were named The Red Stallions.

The hilarity that ensued from the wrong answers spurred the launch of a viral video that ended up generating tens of millions of views.

"We had a killer concept for our main release," Gil Beverly (chief marketing and revenue officer, Tennessee Titans) said. "But our TikTok/IG ‘B-Side’ might have hit even harder.”

That seems like an understatement. The two-minute organic piece of content generated a projected 73.1 million aggregate impressions across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. 

The Atlanta Falcons even temporarily rebranded their team social handles as the “Red Stallions” to capitalize on the buzz it drew. 

So, the question is why did this video receive such a high level of engagement?

Ben Shields, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of

Social Media Management: Persuasion in Networked Culture

, has found organic content consistently creates the most engagement.

“In social media, less is often more. This b-side video looked and felt like all the other DIY videos that find their way into people’s IG and TikTok feeds, and that was part of its appeal,” he said. “It also helped that it had a healthy dose of humor, leading to plenty of engagement that the algorithms rewarded with even more distribution.”

The Titans could have shied away from the fact that the schedule release is not as big of an event among the general population as it is amongst football fans, media and corporate partners, and league and team personnel. Instead, it leaned into that reality creating a video that appealed to the casual and diverse fans who are increasingly consuming sports content on social platforms like TikTok–including women, young adults and people of color, who were all prominently featured in the video. 

“In a perfect world, you would be programming every platform differently,” Beverly said. “It was our intention to target these audiences with B-side video. This platform-specific strategy really paid dividends for us.”

The Titans added to the “B-Side” vibes, and showed it was “in on the joke” and not making fun of the people in the video, by lightly producing the content. 

“This was a stark reminder that good ideas are more important than production value,” Beverly said. “You can tie yourself into knots with budget, influencers, and celebrity integrations, yet, this video was the most viewed scheduled release ever in the NFL without any of those elements.”

Beverly added another important takeaway from this experience is that creativity can best thrive when organizations allow for the exploration of new, non-traditional ideas.

“It really grows out of [an] environment where we allow people the latitude to try things,” the NFL club exec said. “This came out a dialogue of three young team members that felt empowered to chase an idea and put in the sweat equity to make it happen.”

Shields believes the Titans' video reflects how rights owners and sports properties can use organic content to drive outsized fan engagement and grow their audience.

“Teams are also media companies,” he said. “They need to use social media to reach and engage a variety of fans all year long with content that natively fits into each platform."

About the Author: Adam Grossman is the Vice President of Business Insights & Analytics at Excel Sports Management. He works with companies, sports properties, media rights holders, athletes, agencies, and events to determine the value of their most important assets. Grossman is also a professor at Northwestern University Master’s In Sports Administration program and the co-author of The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High-Performance Industry. You can find him at [email protected].

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