Acura is ready to add a little “memeness” to March Madness.
The brand is launching its March Memeness digital promotion on ESPN.com on Friday -- it’s a real-time marketing effort in which its “Meme Team” creates clever memes that tie into the NCAA men's basketball tournament action as it plays out. Memes are humorous photos or GIFs -- bite-size videos -- with catchy phrases that often spread like wildfire on social media.
Acura says the spur-of-the-moment memes play on the “quick-to-react” 2016 ILX sedan and its “Catch It If You Can” advertising campaign theme. The memes will appear in banner ads on ESPN.com.
To complement the ESPN promotion, Acura will send tournament-related tweets from its company account. This is Acura’s third year as the official sponsor of ESPN’s Tournament Challenge -- an online bracket pool.
“It’s a simultaneous play on the performance aspect of the car while also feeding into this huge cultural moment that’s happening right now with March Madness,” said Jessica Fini, an Acura spokeswoman, in an interview.
Ad agency Mullen already has created 103 memes for the campaign, Fini says. Beginning Friday, people will be able to view and share the memes on the Tumblr microblogging site.
“They could be making more,” Fini said. “There should be a lot of content out there.”
