An 'Old-School’ Sell for Ticket
By R. Thomas Umstead -- Multichannel News, 7/29/2007 8:00:00 PM
DirecTV is going old school to promote its new technology-laden “NFL Sunday Ticket” out-of-market games package.
Taking another shot at cable, the nation’s top satellite distributor today (July 30) will kick off a multimillion-dollar, multimedia marketing campaign that resurrects the elderly “Marv Blotchnick” character seen in short spots last year touting NFL Sunday Ticket’s “Super Fan” enhanced-television package, according to Jon Gieselman, senior vice president of advertising and public relations.
“The campaign last year was a huge success and everybody just loved this guy — he had a bit of a cult following. So this year we decided to embrace Marv again,” he said.
Gieselman said the Marv character was created as a classic contrarian who doesn’t like change and is disinclined to embrace anything new, which the satellite service likens to cable operators with regard to the National Football League package and its interactive features.
In addition to the basic $270 Sunday Ticket package, the $99 Super Fan add-on offers several enhanced TV features, including HD feeds for each game, a stand-alone channel offering as many as eight live feeds at a time, a “Red Zone” Channel that alerts viewers of scoring drives from each game as they happen, and access to 30-minute commercial-free replays of each game.
“The metaphor is that Marv was old school, like cable,” Gieselman said. “Cable doesn’t have any of this [DirecTV functionality], and he was complaining about all of this whiz-bang technology that DirecTV has.”
In one of the new commercials, Marv bemoans the fact that DirecTV offers access to every Sunday-afternoon football game. In a caustic retort, Marv bellows, “If I can watch every game on Sunday, what am I gonna read about in the john on Monday?”
In all, DirecTV will roll out three, 30-second spots and two, 15-second commercials for the package, beginning this week. “We’ll begin to weave it in gradually — every week you’ll see more and more of Marv.”
DirecTV declined to disclose where it has scheduled the spots, or other components of its Sunday Ticket media plan.
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