Apparently it was a little bit too quiet around the Notre Dame football offices this summer.
A year after having their every move documented by Showtime’s army of filmmakers for the heralded “A Season With” series, the Irish are opening their doors to a slightly younger, hipper audience.
Notre Dame announced a social media partnership with Bleacher Report on Thursday, believed to be the the first of its kind. B/R will have a team embedded in South Bend, producing a wide array of social media—all to be distributed across the wide variety of outlets on both Notre Dame and B/R’s different social platforms.
“Jack Swarbrick and Brian Kelly have been forward thinkers the past few years. They’re just continuing to push the envelope on what a college football program can become,” Bleacher Report co-founder and CEO Dave Finocchio told me Wednesday. “It’s a huge honor that we get to be a part of the next step in their evolution.”
Viewed as a pilot program, the joint venture allows B/R exclusive access to Notre Dame’s football team—telling a variety of stories that’ll be jointly distributed through Notre Dame’s social media platforms as well as Bleacher Report’s Team Stream app and widely-followed accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Bleacher Report reports more engagement across those three platforms than any other publisher in the U.S.
That reach was one of the many things that appealed to Notre Dame’s head football coach.
“It’s accessibility. Showtime certainly from a production standpoint, and what they put on television is an incredible product, but this reaches so many more people,” Kelly said Thursday. “And our fanbase is so linked in to following us on a day to day basis, this gives them that daily dose of Notre Dame football.”
The content, distributed in a variety of shapes and sizes, will have less of a long-form, narrative focus than last season’s Showtime series. It’ll also capitalize on B/R’s success at connecting with a younger generation of sports fan, something that helps the Irish football program tell their story—to fans and recruits alike.
“We just had this hunch that the way the players’ generation of sports fans sees the game of football, and sports in general, is really different than how their parents and grandparents see sports,” Finocchio said. “We’re trying to create sports video content and experiences for sports fans that do justice to the way they see sports.”
Kelly thinks it’s a partnership that won’t just come in handy with B/R’s younger demographic, but from the traditional segment (don’t you dare call them parents or grandparents) of Irish fans who are spending more and more of their time consuming the internet on their cell phones.
“More people that I run into are starting to understand how easy it is to stay connected to Notre Dame football through their phone,” Kelly said. “Bleacher Report can reach that so called ‘older generation’ through their phone, and by doing so they’ve reached an audience that may not have gotten on their computer, but are now following even moreso on their phone.
The partnership came from a series of conversations, some between Finocchio—a Notre Dame grad—and athletic director Jack Swarbrick. The head of Irish athletics had seen B/R’s handiwork producing Daelin Hayes’s “Dark Knight” inspired commitment video, and that started the wheels turning.
That social media is a focus for the Irish football program should be no surprise. Notre Dame has ramped up the team’s presence across a variety of platforms, connecting with recruits and fans through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and every other place you can think of. And bringing in Bleacher Report fits the vision of Swarbrick’s athletic department, another key partnership to go along with relationships with Under Armour and NBC.
“We’re covering all the mediums that are important to keeping your brand out there amongst all of the people that it matters to,” Kelly said. “With Bleacher Report and the credibility they have with millions of followers, it’s another great partnership that Notre Dame has entered into and I think that we continue to look for those partnerships.”
For Finocchio and the Bleacher Report team, the work begins now. With a production team settling in to follow the Irish’s every move, they’ll begin chronicling this Notre Dame season in a way we’ve never seen.
“We’re really going to be in the business of celebrating the moments of what matter most during the season, whether they happen on game days or on the practice field,” Finocchio said, before allowing himself a moment to hint at the fandom he developed as a student living in Alumni Hall.
“We want people to feel as emotionally invested in the good things that happen as possible. And also hopefully the team has 80-percent less injuries this year than last year.”