Changing the Future, One Snapshot at a Time

The New Paladin Way

INNOVATE. REFINE. PRODUCE.

The Furman University Football team is a small Division 1 team striving to make a name for themselves, not only in the SoCon division, but in the midst of two big time multi national title champions, Clemson and University of South Carolina. The Paladin Marketing Department has struggled to gain fan attendance at the Furman Football games. The Furman student body and the local Greenville area are more consumed in the high energy and well known teams that surround us that they aren’t as willing to go to a small school and low energy football game.

The New Fan Experience

Jason Donnelly, the Athletic Director at Furman, is eager to change the stigma and attitude people have had towards Furman’s football games. He created the “New Fan Experience,” that includes live music, food trucks, games, children activities, a student tailgate inside the stadium, and beer and wine concessions, in order to increase attendance rates at the Furman football games.

The goal of this multimedia project is to capture the New Fan Experience and advertise the new Furman Way of tailgating in order to change the atmosphere of a Saturday game day at Furman and increase the Furman Fan Zone!

_____________________________

Beginning Approach

I began to approach this topic by figuring out how to display the new Furman Tailgate to the community, and the best way I could think of was to create a new hype fan experience that is engaging to all audiences including all the different elements of the first tailgate on September 4th, 2021.

Our client for this project is Ty Osbourne, the Assistant Athletics Director/Marketing & Fan Experience, he thought it would be a good idea to include not only a hype video to increase attendance but to include a portion of a video where we would highlight 3 players unique stories to invest the fans in the lives of the players. However, with the information that Ty gave Rosemary and I we didn’t think the two different emotions of a hype video and pulling on the heart strings would be good in one video. Through this experience of organizing and agreeing on what would be best for the project with the client I have learned that we are all amateurs in what we do and we learn from other amateurs in order to become successful and learn what works and doesn’t work.

“We’re all terrified of being revealed as amateurs, but in fact, today it is the amateur— the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love, regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career– who often has the advantage over the professional.”

Show Your Work, Kleon, pg. 15

Refined Approach

In order to portray a hype fan experience we need would need to create multimedia that would help the narrative. We need to evoke a happy and spirited video in order to give off the mood of the fun and spirited New Fan Experience!!

After brainstorming and working with Ty’s idea, we came to the conclusion that the best way to create a multimedia element that would not only solve the problem of low attendance rates, having a more spirited fan base, not a having a lot of spirit around football games, as well as including content that would line up the narrative we decided to just make a hype Fan Experience video. The video would not only include the tailgate content of the students section but of the all the pregame activities with the children and families! Not only the client is happy with where we are going with the multimedia story but Rosemary and I are also very excited to see what our innovate brains put together for the Furman community!

Takeaways

“That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” 

Show Your Work, Kleon, Pg. 14