Conference USA Launches ‘We Play for You’ Promo Campaign

Conference USA has unveiled a promotional campaign featuring television and radio ads and a new integrated Website. The theme of the campaign is “We Play for You”.

The campaign has been created and produced by Dallas-based Pursuant Sports. “The focus is on the student athlete,” says Pursuant Director of Business Development Mick Prendergast, “because, at the end of the day, that’s what college athletics are all about.” Four 30-second spots are being created to air on such networks as ESPN, CBS College Sports, and Comcast Sports Southeast throughout the 2010-11 season. The videos will also be available on-line and distributed via Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

The spots include a C-USA image piece featuring student athletes from a variety of sports at conference member schools. Another spot focuses on football, and a third promotes sportsmanship. A fourth, on basketball, is in production. Each spot is tagged with the “We Play for You” theme and directs viewers to the Website stories.conferenceusa.com.

On the Website, three- to five-minute profiles highlight individual athletes from C-USA schools. The spots “intro the message and drive people to the Website, where they can learn more about each institution and see and hear these stories about the individual student athletes,” Prendergast says. “We want to draw the fans in to the personal side of the student athletes. Those stories are ingrained with a school. By focusing on the stories through the conference, it helps these stories get more attention. It sheds a good light on the conference.”

The focus on the Website also creates the opportunity to measure the success of the campaign based on site visits.

Although Pursuant Sports has created campaigns for individual schools in the past, this project is unique in that it focuses on an athletic conference and uses the broadcast airings to promote the Website.

The site will be continually updated with new profiles and stories throughout the sports seasons. Each school is responsible for providing its own material. “As many of those as they produce,” says Prendergast, “they will be pumped into the Website.”