Jason Kelce has a pretty distinct look: bushy beard, dark eyebrows, and the build of an offensive lineman. Ahead of this year’s Super Bowl, Marriott Bonvoy found 25 guys who look just like him to keep fans all over New Orleans guessing.
In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, the hotel loyalty brand tapped into the growing popularity of celebrity look-alike contests by holding its own version. Instead of putting out a call for fans to enter themselves into a look-alike contest for a city-associated celebrity, as was the case for Timothée Chalamet look-alikes in New York or Jeremy Allen White doppelgängers in Chicago, Marriott Bonvoy gathered its own Jason Kelce look-alikes to scatter throughout NOLA. Then, five fan duos competed to find the real Kelce during the brand’s activation, with the winning pair scoring a stay in the Courtyard Super Bowl Sleepover Suite inside Caesars Superdome itself, and tickets to the big game the next day.
The event was designed to add a little more fun around the Super Bowl, a matchup between Kelce’s former team, the Philadelphia Eagles, and his brother Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs, while also leveling up Marriott Bonvoy’s partnership with Jason Kelce, who has served as the brand’s first-ever “Fanbassador” since September, according to Peggy Roe, EVP and chief customer officer at Marriott International.
“We’ve been doing the Super Bowl sleepover for a while, and it’s always gotten interest within our customer community,” Roe told Marketing Brew. “So we were thinking about, ‘Well, how do we really tie this to the rest of our campaign and what we’ve been doing with working with Jason Kelce?’”
Kelcepalooza
For Marriott Bonvoy, pulling off the Super Bowl-timed stunt wasn’t about getting in on an internet trend, but was centered on freshening up the approach to its Sleepover Suite experience, now in its ninth year, according to Roe.
“We’ve had these different experiences every week leading up to the Super Bowl for our members to bid their points and experience, which has created a lot of buzz,” Roe said.
This year, the events culminated with the Kelce look-alike activation, which Roe said began when the brand posed its annual question to members: “Why should you be selected to sleep over in our Courtyard Super Bowl Suite?”
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Members who answered the question via a social media contest the previous fall had the possibility to become Kelce-finding contestants. The contest asked Marriott Bonvoy members to fill out a questionnaire about their love for the NFL and Jason Kelce, and after a round of interviews with some semi-finalists, the team narrowed down 5,000 applicants to the final five, who came to New Orleans to compete in the Kelce search, according to Jacob Ron, director of global PR at Marriott International.
While Ron said the idea began percolating ahead of the celebrity look-alike trend taking off, seeing the popularity of others around the country helped solidify the idea.
“When we saw the look-alike trend sort of starting, it was actually really encouraging for us, because we knew that we were on top of something that was culturally relevant, but really wanted to make sure that we had our own spin on it,” Ron told us.
While the five fan duos looking for the real Kelce were self-submitted contest winners, the actual look-alikes were sourced by working with a production team who found NOLA-area doppelgängers—plus one Philadelphia-area native, Garrett Podhyski, who placed second in the city’s Kelce look-alike contest in December and was flown in by the brand to join the fun, according to Ron. Look-alike inception, if you will.
“It's amazing how many people look like Jason Kelce, even just the region,” Ron said.
The stunt resulted in over 200 media placements across national and local media publications, including Good Morning America, GQ, and others, which added up to nearly 2 billion earned impressions, according to Ron. On social, the brand shared content featuring Kelce and the look-alikes, including four different videos across the Marriott Bonvoy and Courtyard Instagram channels as well as a stills carousel and story posts, rather than attempting to create (or wait for) a fan-generated viral moment.
Roe said she credits Kelce’s excitement for creating experiences as a driving force that has allowed the team to do “fun and crazy things together for members” all football season long.
“Our whole philosophy with [these] moments is, ‘How do we create these once-in-a-lifetime experiences that people couldn’t think of creating [themselves], and you can’t really just buy off the shelf?’” Roe said.