Super Bowl Sunday is arguably the year’s biggest sporting event in the United States. This year, at 6:30pm, families gathered together, watched million-dollar commercials, and witnessed the New England Patriots narrowly defeat the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl 49. On the other side of the world, it was Monday morning at 7:30am and Chinese fans gathered at watch parties or tuned in through online broadcasts of the Super Bowl. This year, NFL China utilized two campaigns on Sina Weibo to encourage more Chinese fans to take off work and watch live.
Over the week leading up to the Super Bowl, Chinese fans showed their team’s colors by posting a photo to Weibo and using the hashtag #给点ColorCC#. The hashtag combined both Chinese and English, using a play-on-words where “CC” is interpreted as “See See.” #给点ColorCC# had over 1.8 million impressions and more than 600 fans sent in photos to try to win official NFL gear. The campaign totaled 2.3 million impressions over the week-long campaign.
On the morning of the Super Bowl, NFL China hosted live game day questions, a variation of “prop bets” to ask fans to guess scenarios throughout the game using the hashtag #第49届超级碗# (similar to #SuperBowl49). Questions varied from “which team will score the first touchdown?” to “what song will Katy Perry sing at halftime?” The live game day questions tallied a high-level of engagement with over 1,300 fans participating and 8.1 million reads.
By the end of Super Bowl 49, #第49届超级碗# was the No. 1 trending topic on Sina Weibo, totaling 130 million impressions. From the last week in January the the first week in February, the NFL China weibo account gained 7,500 fans and passed the 400,000 follower threshold.
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