Fireball embraces friendly rivalries in football-centric campaign

Fireball is spicing things up this football season.

Earlier this month, the cinnamon whiskey brand rolled out a new campaign centered on football rivalries. The campaign, which features a new tagline, “Ignite Your Rivalry,” marks the brand’s first paid advertising effort on TikTok, and is part of a strategic effort to strengthen its ties to the sport, according to Danny Suich, Fireball’s global brand manager.

“There’s no better feeling than beating your rivals, and then being able to trash talk your friends who are fans of those rivals,” Suich told Marketing Brew. “We thought that aligned perfectly with what our core mission is on Fireball, to really inject fun and a little bit of mischief into every experience.”

Friendly fire(ball)

The campaign consists of two ads starring comedians Stavros Halkias and Andrew Santino. In both, Halkias loses a bet to Santino, resulting in Halkias shaving his eyebrows in one version and getting a tattoo in the other.

When the Fireball team initially started planning the campaign, they considered going a more traditional route and having pro athletes front the ads, Suich said. But when they thought about who might resonate best with the brand’s target audience and “who would be able to get the tonality of Fireball across in an authentic way,” they landed on the comedians, who are real-life friends and football fans.

“We thought it made the spot feel even more authentic to football fans and to our core demo, because I think they would be able to sniff out if we were just hiring guys who had no idea about the NFL or about college football,” Suich said. “They had this playful rivalry between the two of them, and it led to some really amazing, laugh-out-loud one-liners.”

That “core demo” is a fairly broad audience, though Fireball is particularly focused on 21- to 35-year-olds, Suich said.

New frontier

Fifteen and 30-second cuts of the ads are running during Big Ten and Notre Dame college games on NBC, as well as in NFL games beginning with the Philadelphia Eagles v. Green Bay Packers game in Brazil that streamed on Peacock. Following that game, Fireball ads have been running in Sunday Night Football games on Peacock, as well as across ESPN streaming properties, YouTube, and Meta, according to the brand. Fireball’s media buy also includes TikTok, which opened to alcohol advertisers in the US in early June.

“As soon as that policy shift happened, we obviously realized the opportunity that was on our hands because we know our audience is engaged extensively in the TikTok platform,” Suich said.

By running ads across college football and NFL games, Fireball’s marketing team hopes to drive brand awareness through wide reach, while the TikTok ads are aimed at encouraging engagement and brand recall, Suich said.

“We’re not only focusing on showing up during the biggest football games of the weekend, but also hitting consumers on platforms where we know they’re already engaging,” he said. “We think that we can do an even stronger job of making sure consumers remember the brand after they’ve seen the ad.”

Long game

It’s early days of the campaign, so Suich said he doesn’t have the full scorecard of results yet, but he said engagement indicators “are impressive so far.” The ads are set to run through the rest of the calendar year, he said, and the campaign may even extend beyond the football season into other sports.

Football is Fireball’s primary area of interest in sports, followed by golf, Suich said. As the brand works on “extending our reach into different sports globally,” the team has also been testing some creative tied to soccer, as well as dabbling in darts in the UK and rugby in Australia, he said.

“We’re trying to make sure that whatever we’re doing, we’re connecting back to what our consumers are really looking for,” Suich said. “We want to make sure we’re designing authentic creative and authentic communications that align with their interests, besides launching a campaign just for the heck of it.”