Yahoo Advertising Knock-out Challenge: Growing Local Marketing Talent
By Bre Phelan, Lead Creative Production Manager
At Yahoo, our technical innovators are complemented by our creative talent. The arts and creative thinking are valuable to our business and to innovation. This symbiotic relationship between art and science helps drive development of products that are both powerful for our users and beautiful. With that, we recently welcomed with open arms an opportunity to help grow creative talent right in our backyard. Yahoo Omaha invited the the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska at Omaha to compete in our first-annual Yahoo Advertising Knock-out Challenge. This was a unique opportunity to match university programs with our marketing needs for talent development.
At our Dodge Street office in Omaha, we hosted university students who workshopped solutions to our Yahoo Advertising Knock-out, a marketing challenge that tested the public relations, social media, campaign strategy, budget planning and media buying acumen of 12 teams of six students. The challenge:
Yahoo Sports has been an undeniable force in the Fantasy Sports game for 20 years with millions of users coming every year to play their favorite sports, including the most revered, Fantasy Football.
With major competitors including ESPN.com, NFL.com and CBSSports.com, Yahoo Sports is looking to maintain it's dominance across the desktop and mobile app and continue driving new users to play on Yahoo Fantasy Football.
With a $2M budget, your team’s challenge is to identify belief-based audiences and create a full-funnel marketing plan to engage those users. The plan should strive to be ROI positive and tackle multiple strategies to reach and engage the target audience. Belief-based audiences examples include:
People with not enough time
People who chose the fantasy platform all their friends use
People who aren't interested in football
People who are already in too many leagues
Three ‘Hoos, Hobson Powell, Bre Phelan, and Jillian Droge judged the innovative student proposals. Students’ solutions included the following tactics:
The first place winners employed numerous innovative tactics across social media, including a partnership with Amazon's Alexa and encouraged families to participate in the Yahoo Fantasy Football app with the tagline "Who Said Draft Time Can't Be Family Time".
The second place winners proposed "taking Yahoo fantasy to the office" to promote inter-office collaboration and camaraderie.
Other teams’ tactics included:
Leveraging prominent social media influencers to recruit new Yahoo Fantasy Football users;
Using the Yahoo Blitz bot to make the Fantasy Football experience approachable and enjoyable to target audiences, experts and beginners; and
Deploying Yahoo campus representatives to evangelize Fantasy Football.
First place winners: Joe Franco (UNO), Elizabeth Stevens (UNO), Megan Nelson (UNL), and Hannah Paxton (UNL)
Second place winners: April Knipp (UNO), Amy Nielsen (UNO), Haley Schepers (UNL), and Linsey Armstrong (UNL).
The Yahoo judges were extremely impressed with the student presentations and were blown away by the caliber of their unique and well-thought-out ideas.
Through partnerships like this, we’re doing the important job of helping to grow the workforce of tomorrow and to build a stronger more prosperous future for our local economies.
