The Red River Shoot Out! What tradition! Spectacle. Pageantry. Spirt. Tailgates. Obnoxity.* (*Not a word). Have you been? If not, picture deafening chaos with 90,000 screaming fans, many drunk, half in burnt orange and half in crimson. Pretty easy to see where the lines are drawn in the bleachers. May the best team win.
Special good luck to Texas Tech’s former second- or third-string quarterback. Anyone else think John Snow of Game Of Thrones is Baker Mayfield and vice versa? I digress …
So about the orange and the red. Sometimes the lines blur. Ha … that is my set up for an old story. This is a story from The Old Cotton Bowl at Dallas Fair Park … a legendary stadium with no Wi-Fi back then. (The Wi-Fi is spotty at best these days) … I digress … The actual Cotton Bowl is nothing like the venue for the modern day Cotton Bowl game later in the year at AT&T Cowboys Stadium, a veritable audio visual Wi-Fi nirvana.
…
Back in the day I was the PR guy for a company that was always out to top its most recent guerrilla marketing stunt. We put together the first USA-wide roadtrip by a blogger. The company even paid for an advertisement tattooed on some numbskull’s head. We handed out just about ever branded chotsky known to man — yoyos, slinkies, pens, candles … anything on which the company logo could be branded. Ha … I think we had t-shirts printed up for about every event known to man.
Well, one year the Red River Shootout became no exception. Oh we did t-shirts … As PR guy for the firm, I was sent to the game with The Human Billboard in tow, and was asked to come up with ideas to get more attention. This is where the line blurs. The Human Billboard and I carried in a duffel bag half-full of crimson colored t-shirts. Yes you might have guessed it. The other half of the duffel was filled with burnt orange t-shirts.
All of the t-shirts had white lettering, and all said the name of my employer and Red River Shootout (not that sissy “Red River Rivalry” PC crap …). Half the shirts said, “Beat OU!” Half said, “Beat Texas!” … Ha … the football crazed fans were almost ripping the shirts from our hands when we started passing out the shirts. The fans didn’t care. They were in an orange-vs.-crimson frenzy … and they quickly snatched up all the shirts. Some people just put them on as fast as they could, right over their current shirts.
Few even read the shirts’ messages, just grabbed them up or put them on.
Then slowly we could see the realization and puzzlement* on the faces and we could see our little joke spreading through the stands around us. (* That is a word.) The red shirts were imprinted with “Beat OU!” The burnt orange shirts proclaimed, “Beat Texas!”
Bass ackwards!
It was quirky and unexpected. We thought it really funny. Some of the people were laughing about it too. Most kind of scratched their heads. No fights broke out … a good thing. Branding accomplished.
Good luck all … no matter what color.
Know what I sayin?
