Barstool’s Best College Town
Beginning in August, Barstool Sports started their annual “Best College Town” Competition. The competition was structured in a 64-team, single-elimination bracket similar to NCAA basketball and their “March Madness” tournament.
Schools were broken up into 4 regions based on what their school is most know for. These regions were: Tradition, Party, Brains, and Sports. Illinois was placed as the 7 seed in the Tradition Region.
Scoring for each round was based on post-engagement and conversions. The first two rounds were weighted heavily toward SMS sign-ups with likes and shares also granting points.
Champaign cruised through these first rounds, even outscoring every other team in the Tradition Region in the second round, driven largely by SMS conversions.
During these rounds, the team at Barstool Illini employed different strategies to drive conversions. We reached out to every famous alumnus of the University and asked if they would film a short video asking people to vote. We also partnered with a local bar to offer incentives for people who signed up for SMS alerts using our code.
After winning the round of 32 against the team at the University of Colorado – Boulder, it became clear that the strategies that we built would give us a chance to win our region.
We would get past the viceroy teams at UMass-Amherst and Ohio University using these same strategies.
In the Final Four, we would go up against the University of Iowa. The team at Iowa is one of the most impressive in the viceroy program and consistently receives a large amount of engagement on their posts.
A new way of voting was added in this round. Voters would come to a “bar night” hosted by the viceroys and two representatives from Barstool’s Chicago office. In-person votes, paired with merchandise sales, were weighted so heavily that these two conversion methods alone would decide the winner.
In the end, Champaign would beat Iowa city by only 235 votes.
While Champaign would eventually fall to Knoxville in the Championship, we put up one of the most impressive performances in the tournament. In all rounds except one, Barstool Illini faced a school with a larger follower base. Despite this, my team continuously outperformed these other accounts in both engagement and conversions, amassing over 5600 SMS sign-ups in two weeks and selling over 250 t-shirts in just under one week.
