Wendy's Sponsors ESPN's Football Friday
Wendy's signed on as the exclusive sponsor of ESPN's suite of football related content.
Wendy's signed on as the exclusive sponsor of ESPN's suite of football related content.
Everyone knows about Monday Night Football and Sunday Night Football. Starting today, there’s Football Friday, ESPN’s suite of football related content that launches across ESPN properties, including ESPN.com and ESPN Mobile. Wendy’s signed on as the exclusive sponsor and is running a string of standard display and video ads across the digital properties.
The content platform was created by ESPN and Starcom’s MediaVest, Wendy’s media buying agency, to provide fans with a variety of football content to kick off their weekends. NFL and college content includes previews of upcoming games and other highlights that will run as short form video clips on the Web and mobile properties, said Lisa Valentino, ESPN’s VP of digital advertising sales.
Wendy’s will run fifteen-second pre-roll ads before each of three videos, and also brand them, Valentino said. The first two videos are highlights from “Mike & Mike in the Morning” and “The Herd with Colin Cowherd,” which run on TV and radio. The third is a video created exclusively for the Web by ESPN featuring analysts discussing upcoming games.
Kristen Multer, MediaVest’s VP, digital director, said Wendy’s bought an exclusive sponsorship of the Football Friday content “to bring something new to the consumer. Friday is a hot day for football and we wanted to develop a platform.”
In addition to homepage takeovers on ESPN.com, a separate Friday Football destination features a variety of standard rich media and Flash banners, along with the custom video units. Football Friday is being promoted at other areas of ESPN.com, including the college and pro football pages. Valentino said a series of co-branded units will also run across the site.
ESPN Mobile will feature a WAP page that includes a variety of college and NFL content, along with scoreboards, Multer said. The Football Friday page will also be available there, along with the video content.
The exclusive sponsorship will run through the regular football season, until January 1, 2010. ESPN.com attracts 17.1 million monthly uniques, according to comScore Media Metrix; nine million visit ESPN Mobile each month, according to M:Metrics.