During Super Bowl XLVII, 108 million Americans tuned in to see a Wilson football fly across the field for 60 minutes of gameplay between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers. With that much screen time, there’s was no need for the brand to spend upwards of $3.8 million dollars on a 30-second tv spot. Instead, to connect with fans, Wilson turned to GIFs. 11 days before kickoff, Wilson Sporting Goods Co. launched wilsonmorewin.tumblr.com, a visual storytelling platform that provided America with a unique look into the life of the Super Bowl football. Of the 41 posts on this Tumblr, nine were strategically engineered GIFs. Wilson's Tumblr documents Ada, Ohio - a town made up of 2.08 square miles and a little over 5,000 people who are dedicated to providing Wilson footballs to the Super Bowl. Successful for increasing awareness and virality of short form visual content, Tumblr was the ideal platform for Wilson to showcase it’s Super Bowl balls as GIFS. As seen in the video, the GIFs were a mix of Ada, OH, and the balls being laced, laser engraved, pumped and branded. The Tumblr attracted 114 thousand views and garnered over three thousand likes/reblogs. Of that, close to 90 thousand views were of GIF content. One GIF, a rotation of past Super Bowl balls since 1967, saw 60 thousand views, 1,751 reblogs from Tumblrs like Newsweek and USAToday, and a post on Buzzfeed. Four of the nine GIFs posted were given a featured Tumblr tag (#GIF), increasing engagement and views. A GIF of the losing team’s ball, 49ers’, being laser engraved, was curated by Tumblr’s editors and given three featured tags (#Sports, #GIF, #NFL) which attracted over 22K views. Overall, GIFS generated 78% of the Tumblr’s views. The GIFs increased fan interaction for the brand across the web; Wilson’s Facebook fans increased by 11%, there were 22K views of the Tumblr’s videos on YouTube, and 684K people were reached on Twitter through mentions. Overall, over 25 million digital impressions were generated from Wilson’s More Win Tumblr.
