Nerf Fans Come Out Shooting in UGC Ad Promotion

Fans of Hasbro’s Nerf line of sports and toy gun products will get their moment of glory this Sunday during the broadcast of “The Simpsons” on the Fox Network. That’s when one grand prize winner will be chosen from the finalists in the Nerf Battle of the Ads competition and have his or her user-generated spot broadcast over national TV.

The UGC ad contest, which launched in May and amassed some 1,500 entries by the time submissions closed on September 12, is the first such promotion to take in the entire line of Nerf products, from soft footballs and other sports equipment to the more battle-ready N-Strike automatic guns, N-Force foam swords and battleaxes, and dart tag products, all the way to the Super Soaker water guns.

Entrants 13 and older were asked to create a video no longer than 25 seconds featuring at least one of the Nerf product lines and upload it to the Director’s Toolbox section of the contest website. There they could enhance their ads with permissioned music and logo graphics, including the tag line “It’s Nerf or Nothing”.

Visitors to the site were able to start voting for their favorite ads in the site’s video gallery beginning in June and public voting continued through September 26. Hasbro judges considered the popular vote in making their selection of 10 finalists in early October, along with creativity, the spot’s effectiveness in demonstrating Nerf products, and “the level of energy of Nerf play depicted.”

That level of energy could theoretically have posed a problem, of course, since in real life players often get carried away in the heat of simulated battle and try stunts that could have exposed Nerf to liability or at least made the ads unusable in broadcast. So Hasbro was careful to include [a short video explaining the do’s and don’ts] of the competition. For example, actors in the ads were required to wear Nerf vision gear when that was advisable t avoid eye injuries, to use the products unmodified and only in ways outlined on the packaging, and to avoid aiming at anyone’s face, eyes or head.

The video also explained that all participants in a submitted video had to sign a release allowing their depiction, and anyone under the age of 13 had to get a parent’s permission.

“It’s increasingly important to us to engage with our fan base, which we call Nerf Nation,” says Kelly Stone, U.S. marketing director for the Nerf brand. “That base is extremely involved with social media, and we’ve seen a lot of user-generated content out there in the world around Nerf. So we wanted to leverage that in our social platform.”

The brand currently has a Nerf YouTube channel and rolled out both a Facebook page and a Twitter account for Nerf shortly before the start of the contest. That Facebook page now has more than 71,000 likes, and the brand has about 1,000 followers on Twitter. Meanwhile the YouTube channel has had more than 589,000 channel views and more than 4 million upload views, largely because of the buzz around the Battle of the Ads contest, Stone says.

“The beauty of this campaign is that it really set everything on fire for us [in social media],” she says. “Those Facebook fans have pretty much all come in the last six to eight months.”

While Hasbro did some online advertising to promote the contest, analysis of the incoming traffic to NerfBattleoftheAds.com has revealed that the largest proportion of visitors are navigating straight to the site using the URL. That indicates that Nerf’s use of the URL in broadcast media and in social media paid off well, Stone says.

The target demographic for Nerf products starts at about 8 and has no real upper limit, says Kathleen Seguin, director of global promotions and marketing partnerships for parent company Hasbro. “This is a campaign specific to Nerf, but we have a lot of other brands that fit into a wide demographic and for which we do promotions: G.I. Joe, Transformers and a number of our game properties, for example.”

Echoing that wide appeal, the plan to announce the winner was teased last week in a broadcast format with a similarly broad demographic appeal: Fox Network’s Sunday night animation block. The contest winner will be announced on November 21 during the broadcast of “The Simpsons”.

In addition to seeing his or her submission shown on national TV, that winner will also receive a $10,000 check. The winning submission may become a regular part of Nerf’s broadcast campaign for the holidays, and it and the other nine finalists will remain available for viewing on the NerfBattleoftheAds.com site.