Dive Brief:
- Sports marketers from Clemson to the NBA are finding Vine’s six second clips give them plenty of time to get a message across to its audience.
- Clemson, for example, is focused on video with its social media strategy, and Vine offers an outlet conducive for its digital staff with limited resources and manpower.
- Vine became a larger part of the NBA’s marketing at the All-Star Weekend this February generating almost 36 million loops over that weekend.
Dive Insight:
In some ways it seems like Vine and its six-second limitation has been overshadowed by the rapid rise of Snapchat as a marketing medium, but some sports marketers have found Vine to be an effective way to get brief, but meaningful, messages to their audiences.
Jonathan Gantt, director of new and creative media at Clemson University, faces resource and manpower issues, and has found Vine to be an effective platform for his team of undergrads. He said, “We asked ourselves, ‘Where can we give some of these students great experiences and put them in a spot to be successful?’ That’s where Vine, Instagram and really, short-form video, became a focus of our content team. We thought, ‘Let’s give undergraduate students a place where they could be successful.’”
The NBA is also utilizing the video platform according to Melissa Rosenthal Brenner, the NBA’s senior vice president of digital media. She told Forbes, “Six seconds allows us to post some deeper and more involved content while still keeping the whole interaction brief. There is also a particular creative and artistic nature to the platform that makes it unique.”
Vine as a marketing platform has also been found in some unexpected places, such as tech giant Cisco using the platform to reach B2B technology influencers with a new storytelling campaign.
"In the B2B space, the challenge is really to tell a complex story in an understandable way," Kirsten Chiala, digital content manager at Cisco's The Network, the company's technology news site, told AdAge. "We wanted to think outside the box in telling our most strategic and top-priority storylines. We've seen a lot of Vines in the consumer space, but not a lot in B2B."
Cisco had previously used Vine, but for industry stats and technical information rather than marketing.