The NFL doesn’t get it. At least not as of April 26, 2018. On that day, the professional football league announced that twenty-two players invited to attend the 2018 NFL Draft would select their own walk-up music, which would play as each respective athlete’s name was called. That’s where the NFL won. Where the league lost is in not stopping there.
Instead, along with announcing the incorporation of personalized music, the NFL revealed all twenty-two player specific songs, affectively reducing their announcement to a single moment. As a result, the league cost itself twenty-two additional opportunities for media coverage and social media conversation.
A more strategic approach would have been to stop at the initial announcement, which in and of itself is worthy of national media attention, and then stagger the releases of each player’s song at a later time or date. Suddenly every pick would be accompanied by pre-release speculation and reactionary social conversation once unveiled. Pausing and deconstructing the story into individual parts would have extended the league’s voice well beyond the single announcement they opted for.
The rule here is one I have executed against for every major launch over the course of my career: break up your stories. Dissect your media opportunities into as many micro stories as you can without sacrificing the scale of the initial release. Brands often package as much content into a single announcement as they can, thinking “bigger is better,” when the reality is that an over packed story leads to diminishing returns and wasted opportunities for conversation down the road.
Stop scooping yourselves. Break up your stories.
