STRATEGY: 🤔
USF Football 2016 Branding
After finishing the last season 8-5, bowl eligible, and with 92% of the offense returning, USF was poised for a big season. We wanted to have a bold look that focused on the secondary neon color palette that would appeal to recruits.
We wanted to stand out on your timeline, allow the players to showcase their personalities, but remain consistent with the look. We achieved all three.
In-venue video board animations that kept the style of what fans were seeing online.
National Signing Day 2016
For the 2016 recruiting class at the University of South Florida, Head Coach Willie Taggart had two key strategies. 1) He wanted to "put a fence" around Tampa Bay's best high school players and 2) align his up and coming program with the school's rich, but young history. As one of the youngest head coaches in the country, Coach Taggart wanted to do it with swagger that would connect with recruits.
In 2007, USF briefly landed at #2 team in the BCS rankings. For a program that was 10 years old, it was a meteoric rise. Recruits for the class of 2016, would have been 8 or 9 during that time, when Raymond James Stadium was sold out, and the university was making a name for itself on the football field.
We wanted to connect the early success of the team when the recruits were younger, to the more immediate success of the season that had just ended.
In order to maximize the impact for the incoming class that was committing to USF, we created content specific to each of the platforms that recruits were engaging with. Graphics including the Tampa skyline were posted to Instagram and Facebook. Short-form video was published to Vine, and animated GIFs showcased more of the player's personality on Twitter. We asked the recruits for the song they would like on their video, and included the other teams that were recruiting them in the GIF.
In order to continue building the fence around the Tampa Bay area, we also highlighted running back Marlon Mack in a short vignette. Mack played high school in the Tampa Bay area, and decided to stay in Tampa to play in front of his family. Entering his junior year, he had already been name to the All-Conference team twice, and was setting program records every year. He was the perfect example of the type of player that Taggart wanted to recruit. Local, talented, and determined to improve the program.
We also produced a short vignette of Coach Taggart, which allowed him to share his vision, not only to this year's class, but to future recruits, and the USF fan base.