Interactive Fan Experiences: College football bowl season has looked drastically different in recent years, but that hasn’t stopped the top bowl games from creating innovative and engaging experiences for the fans in attendance regardless of crowd size.
From the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic to the College Football Playoff National Championship and everything in between, game producers have ignited interaction and told compelling stories. The engaging storytelling tactics on display offered a master class in how to interact with your audience.
Interactive Fan Experiences Within the Stadium
Fans lucky enough to attend a bowl game in 2020 had numerous opportunities to interact with the game presentation directly, making fans an integral part of the show.
Igniting Friendly Competition
Team vs. team competitions help raise the energy within the stadium and get the crowd involved. One of the easiest ways to create this competition is with a Hashtag Poll between the two teams. The 2020 Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic and 2021 College Football Playoff (CFP) provided two great examples of this in action.
Interactive Fan Experiences at the Cotton Bowl: Taking it a step further, the Goodyear Cotton Bowl added some creativity to the competition by tasking fans with sending a GIF in support of their team, and the response within the stadium was electric.
Bringing the Fans Center Stage
If there’s one thing fans love more than showing support for their team, it’s seeing themselves on screen. Across each bowl game, producers can give fans ample opportunity to do so by featuring their comments and photos in real-time, leveraging Tagboard’s diverse suite of visualizations.
From custom L-Bar layouts that pair with live shots to fullscreen Murals, fans within the stadium and cheering on from home are able to contribute to the overall game atmosphere through social media.
Engaging and Impactful Storytelling
The biggest stages in college football often bring big time storylines and even bigger celebrities. Within each stadium, game producers can bring those celebrities and storylines to life, capturing the attention of every fan in attendance — and creating a world class interactive fan engagement experience.
The Celebrity Spotlight
Whether you’re at home scrolling through your timeline or at the game, you want to know what the biggest names are saying about the action on the field. To keep fans engaged in the stadium show during timeouts, that’s exactly the content that game producers surfaced on screen.
The 2021 Rose Bowl presented relevant, timely content from the top alumni and notable celebrities for each team to tell a powerful story. Several Notre Dame alumni including Chase Claypool, and Jaylon Smith voiced their support of the team, while Alabama alumni and ex-players including Reggie Bush, Mark Ingram and Calvin Ridley showed recognition to the future Heisman Trophy winner, DeVonta Smith.
The conversation around DeVonta Smith didn’t stop in the Rose Bowl. As he rewrote the record books in the CFP National Championship, fans in attendance saw real-time reactions from the biggest names in sports including Lebron James who showed his respects despite rooting for Ohio State to win.
Captivating Visual Storytelling
For interactive fan engagement at the CFP National Championship, Van Wagner Sports & Entertainment (VWSE) producers painted the picture using Tagboard Heatmaps to visualize where the conversation was happening across the nation and broke out commentary onto team-specific designs.
Video courtesy of VWSE & College Football Playoff
Along with the entertaining and timely social commentary, fans in attendance at the CFP National Championship as well as the Goodyear Cotton Bowl relived the biggest moments of the game through the lens of photographers on the sidelines. Showcasing near real-time photos in this “Snapshots” segment, producers captivated fans with stunning images of the game from all angles.
Video courtesy of VWSE & College Football Playoff
Whether fans are watching at home on TV or in the stadium, they expect a more immersive digital experience. Using the diverse multitude of visualizations and the flexibility of the Tagboard platform, producers can provide just that, telling engaging and interactive stories on the fly.