March Adness: Capital One’s Road Trip Keeps on Delivering

Capital One have been the sponsor for the NCAA March Madness tournament now for fifteen years. And for ten of those years they’ve marked the occasion with their “Road Trip” campaign, in which Samuel L Jackson, Charles Barkley and Spike Lee hit the road for comedy hijinks, with plenty of guest stars and in-jokes for attentive fans.

“Road Trip” been one of the most successful creative platforms in sports sponsorship history. Not only are the ads a great way to use celebrity guest stars, it’s also a showcase for how to build a campaign around a sports event and how to invest in long-term creative consistency. Let’s unpack just how it does that.

This year’s top-scoring ad on our Test Your Ad database is “Ice Kareem”, which as the name suggests guest-stars Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as an ice cream man who serves up delicious flavors (and terrible puns) to our intrepid trio. The key to using celebrities well in ads is to use them in ways that are linked to what they’re best known for, but in a larger-than-life and unusual way. In other words, use the ad to show the audience something they can’t get anywhere else.

“Road Trip” pulls that off by putting the emphasis on the stars hanging out, joking and chatting with each other. After a decade, the rapport between the three of them really shines through. It’s an example of what we call a “Hired Device” – like a Fluent Device, where a brand creates a recurring element that drives the creative execution across multiple ads, except using characters or celebrity figures not owned by the brand. Hired Devices can be risky, as there’s a danger of the celebrity eclipsing the actual brand involved.

But with a decade’s worth of ads under their belts, Capital One’s stars have moved well beyond that. Their antics have become a March Madness tradition, and are a shining example of what we talk about in our recent Compound Creativity report. In that study we looked at the elements which come together to create long-term business impact above and beyond what any individual ad can provide. One of the elements of creative consistency that matters most is a commitment to creative platforms that can work for years, building audience expectation and happiness as well as brand equity. The “Road Trip” ads are one such platform.

The effectiveness of “Road Trip” is most striking when we look at it in a competitive context. Credit Cards are not a sexy category for advertising. The average score for a US credit card ad is a painful 1.9-Stars, putting the sector as a whole in our lowest effectiveness bracket. But this “Road Trip” ad scores a very strong 4.3-Stars, massively ahead of the average on our predictor of long-term effectiveness.

That success doesn’t come at the expense of short-term impact. The ad gets an Exceptional score on our short-term sales-predicting Spike Rating, again way above the category norm. Finally, the ad beats the average on Brand Fluency, our recognition measure, showing how ten years of “Road Trip” ads have made viewers familiar with these all-star team ups.

While celebrity fun is at the heart of the ads, “Road Trip” never forgets there’s a sporting event involved. The March Madness tournament and particularly the Final Four are threaded through the commercial, and there are plenty of references and jokes to remind viewers of the game. In our Sport Dividend report we look at how ads around sports events can appeal to both a general and a fan audience, and earn a “Sport Dividend” of effectiveness with material which attracts fans without putting off casual viewers.

“Road Trip” is integrated with a wider range of fan-oriented social media material and competitions centered on the Final Four, so the campaign as a whole earns its response both from general and fan audiences. Whoever comes out on top in the event, Capital One and their celebrity stars look set to be winners for another decade to come.