Most college athletes go pro in something other than sports, the NCAA likes to say in its commercials, and that fact isn’t lost on NCAA corporate partner Enterprise Rent-A-Car.
The world’s largest rental car company will launch a new TV ad during March Madness featuring 16 of the company’s employees, each of whom played college sports.
The 30-second spot called “We Played” is the culmination of a massive casting call that went out via email to Enterprise employees in the Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles areas. More than 200 employees responded by uploading self-made videos to an internal site, expressing why they should be included in the ad.
The 16 former athletes were chosen based on subsequent screen tests conducted by Enterprise’s ad agency, St. Louis-based Cannonball Advertising and Promotion. The company wanted a diverse group of athletes representing a variety of sports.
The spot will launch next month on CBS, Turner networks and ESPN.
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Enterprise will continue a campaign featuring its own people by introducing NCAA basketball tournament fans to company employees who played college sports.
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“We’re fortunate to have so many folks join the company who were former NCAA athletes, and we thought it’d be great if we could take them and make them part of the campaign,” said Patrick Farrell, chief marketer for Enterprise Holdings, the umbrella company for the Enterprise, National and Alamo brands. “We started a campaign last year featuring real employees, and the use of former student athletes this year is an extension of that.”
The tie between Enterprise and the college space is a logical one. No U.S. company recruits more college graduates annually than Enterprise, according to CollegeGrad.com. Enterprise each summer brings in close to 2,000 interns and in 2011 made more than 8,000 entry-level hires. BusinessWeek called Enterprise one of the best places to launch a career because of its management program and culture of promoting from within.
A team of 200 recruiters works for Enterprise to find future employees to go to work in the St. Louis-based corporate headquarters or at one of 7,000 company locations.
Given the company’s strong ties to colleges, Enterprise decided in 2005 to invest in an NCAA corporate partnership that comes with full marketing and media rights to the basketball tournament and other championships. That deal runs through the 2013 tournament. Financial details of the sponsorship weren’t available, but most NCAA deals, which are sold by media partners Turner and CBS, go for the high seven figures annually.
Enterprise in the past has used the ad units that come with the sponsorship to run its “We’ll pick you up” spots during the NCAA tournament.
The company, working with Cannonball, changed direction last year with a new ad campaign called “The Enterprise Way,” which used employees in eight different spots. The campaign marked the first new creative approach for the company since 1989, with the idea to have actual employees emphasizing the company’s commitment to customer service.
Incorporating former college athletes into “The Enterprise Way” campaign was the logical next step for March Madness this year. The spot will debut in the coming weeks and also run during other NCAA championships during the course of the year.
Employees in the spot were paid actors’ scale wages for their work.
At the Final Four in New Orleans, Enterprise does not have plans to activate in Bracket Town, the fan fest area, but it will manage the fleet of Buicks (another NCAA corporate partner) for all of the NCAA officials in need of a car.
