Partners Visa and Bank Of America linked to give New England Patriots fans a chance to ‘Travel Inside The Game’ via a virtual reality Patriots training session experience.
To help the fans get a more immersive experience of life as an NFL player, the bank and paymenets giant distributed 10,000 Google Cardboard virtual reality headsets at the team’s Gillette Stadium (in Massachusetts) at the start of the Patriots vs Eagles game on Sunday, 6 December.
The headsets enables the fans to download the commercial partner’s YouTube app 360° #InsideTheGame video experience onto their smartphones and then view it via the Cardboard device (or on iOS, Android or even desktop) in 3D VR format to get right into the middle of the on-field action.
The immersive experience stretches from training pitch scrimmages and practice moves, to the team’s locker room.
The initiative is part of the Bank Of America ‘Travel Rewards Visa’ promotion pushing its Bank Americard Travel Rewards Visa Card which aims to offer an alternative to the restrictions of typical airline rewards cards.
The sponsors and the team both hope that the interactive experience will bring the supporters and the squad closers together by bringing them in to the heart of a team practice session.
The campaign was developed in harness with STRIVR, a San Francisco Bay area virtual reality training company.
Comment
This cool and immersive activation shows that the virtual reality trend continues to gather pace.
Indeed, this is just the latest example in an increasingly long list of VR sponsorship innovations which stretches from Samsung Galaxy’s WSL ‘Get Barreled In Tahiti’ (see case study), to AIG’s ‘360 Haka Challenge (see case study) and Gatorade ‘Bryce Harper At Bat 360 (see case study).
One of the challenges of VR activations is that they require a viewer headset – which isn’t always the easiest thing to obtain for thousands of fans.
This campaign aims to solve this barrier with a huge Google Cardboard, at-stadium giveaway.
But while 10,000 is a pretty big number for a mass device distribution, the Gillette Stadium holds 68,756 fans – so most of them missed out.
Both Visa and Bank Of America are official New England Patriots partners.
BOFA is a partner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, while earlier this year Visa extended its partnership with the NFL itself.
Visa’s new five-year league deal saw the global payments giant has had an official deal with the league since 1995.
Links
Visa BOFA 360:
Visa BOFA 360:
https://checkout.visa.com/campaign/us/en/bofa-cardboard/index.jsp?ep=v_sym_bofa360
Visa YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/visabrand
New England Patriots:
NFL:
http://www.nfl.com/
STRIVR
