The ACC Builds Around Bobbleheads for College Football Kickoff
With the college sports landscape regularly shifting and schools realigning to meet increasingly competitive interests, the Atlantic Coast Conference has to focus on what it has that the others don’t.
Like Tar Heels, Demon Deacons, or giant oranges with eyes and appendages.
As the ACC enters the third year of its “ACCOMPLISH GREATNESS” campaign, the 18-school conference is still getting comfortable with 2024 newcomers, Southern Methodist, Stanford, and Cal, while learning its way around an NCAA settlement that allows schools to pay athletes directly. To give fans a sense of what the ACC looks like amid all of those changes, the conference’s creative partners at Wasserman worked with ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips to develop two spots using bobbleheads of school mascots and cheerleaders to highlight their athletic, academic, and cultural traditions.
“As we took a look at just the landscape, we recognized that we have something that they necessarily don’t, which is culturally iconic marks that extend far beyond sport,” said Danny Nunez, chief creative officer at Wasserman. “When you look at the [North Carolina] Tar Heel, when you look at a [Wake Forest] Demon Deacon or a Miami Hurricane, and when you look at brands and culture—especially from a merch, streetwear, or a fashion play—when they go to license NCAA schools to do edition collegiate drops, they’re using ACC marks, so as we started to identify that within the culture, we said, ‘Wait a minute, we have something really special here.’”
The latest installment of the campaign has given the bobbleheads the collective title of ACC ICONS. In the first spot, at a location “somewhere in the ACC,” a bobblehead of Clemson’s The Tiger has assembled a structure out of building blocks, textbooks, pizza boxes, and dorm furniture. Stanford’s mascot, The Tree, asks if it’s a house, and The Tiger responds that it’s a “powerhouse.”
By the second ad—”Reason For the Season”—Wake Forest’s Demon Deacon is cast as the orator he was born to play: Leading a discussion of why the ACC is great. While his “complete” list consists of one item—Wake Forest—the other bobbleheads chime in with ACC game days, football, basketball, “every sport, really,” a bicoastal footprint, attractiveness, smarts, and other attributes that quickly overwhelm the Deacon’s blackboard.
“This new evolution of our ‘ACCOMPLISH GREATNESS’ campaign strives to further strengthen the ACC’s national brand with increased visibility, relevance, and reputation,” said Martha Schwab, vp of creative strategy at the ACC: “The collection of schools in the ACC represents the best in college athletics, both on and off the field—and there is no shortage of greatness.”
