Bridgestone Underlines Super Bowl Sponsorship with Facebook Ticket Giveaway

It may seem a bit early to be thinking about the Super Bowl. After all, the New York Jets haven’t even folded yet. But it’s not too early not for those determined to get tickets to the 45th annual matchup, taking place Feb. 6 2011 at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington TX.

Tire maker and SB XLV halftime sponsor Bridgestone is targeting just those forward-looking fans with a Facebook sweepstakes that could earn them a trip to the big game along with $1,000 in National Football League merchandise.

The contest asks visitors to like Bridgestone’s Facebook page. Once that’s done, they can click through the game app and enter the drawing for two tickets to the game, together with a 4-night stay in north Texas, round-trip airfare and the NFL swag. Entrants can post one entry to the contest per day through Sunday January 9.

“We wanted to show appreciation to fans of the brand, and what better way to reward them than by giving them the most sought-after event ticket of the year,” says Michael Fluck, director of brand and retail marketing for Bridgestone.

The contest, run by agency Big Prize Giveaways for Bridgestone, is neither the manufacturer’s first use of Facebook to promote its Super Bowl and football sponsorships. Last June, the company ran a Facebook promotion that gave away a set of tires every day to someone who entered the contest after liking the Bridgestone profile page.

Another contest in august gave away two tickets to the Bridgestone Invitational golf tournament along with a chance to go behind the ropes and get exclusive access. Running both those promotions helped Bridgestone learn about how to create interest and tailor offers within its Facebook promotions, according to Chris Brashear, interactive marketing specialist for the company.

“Any time you can offer exclusive content or access, you’re likely to accelerate the organic growth of your Facebook audience,’ says Brashear. Right now, the company has about 76,400 “likes’ on its Facebook page.

“We’re definitely using promotions in Facebook to grow our fan base, but more importantly it’s serving as an extension of our other initiatives,” says Fluck. “For example, we have relationships with the Bridgestone Invitational, and we’re the official tire of the NFL and the PGA tour. We use those and activate sweepstakes and in-store promotions around them as well as online marketing. It certainly complements and targets fans we’re already reaching in other ways who may have a further interest in engaging with us online.”

While Fluck maintains that Bridgestone’s targeted consumers are more active online than those of other companies in its category, he admits that the company has not yet done any segmentation to break out a portrait of the type of customer who fans Bridgestone on Facebook.

“We haven’t done a lot of analysis of our fan base per se,” he says. ‘We’re been more involved in monitoring and adjusting our message based on the response we’re seeing in social media.”

Super Bowl XLV began appearing in discussion threads as early as last March, when Bridgestone started a conversation with fans about which musical groups should appear during next year’s Bridgestone Half-Time Show. Discussion of that topic continued for months and really was only replaced last week by the rollout of the sweepstakes—even though neither Bridgestone nor its Facebook fans can have any say in who appears during the Super Bowl broadcast.

“Our Facebook page went active in January of this year, and a lot of the original content was geared toward activating for Super Bowl XLIV,” says Brashear. “Now we’re coming full circle and fans are thinking about the next Super Bowl., so it makes sense for that to big the big event we tie into.”

As it did last year, Fluck says Bridgestone will use Facebook, YouTube and other online channels to tease its in-game TV spots with behind-the-scenes photos and video a few weeks before the big game and for replays after the broadcast. But the company also plans to use Facebook and social networking in general to extend its broadcast efforts in so-far-unspecified ways and thus get more bang for its TV buck.

“We have plans to have a lot more unique content available online after the game,” he says. “A lot of it will come after the Super Bowl, which we have not done in the past.”