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For brands sponsoring college bowl games, it’s no longer enough to turn your cheese cracker into a mascot or burn your toaster-pastry mascot alive and have teams eat it in front of fans: You need to be the Snoop Dogg of postseason play.
There are 47 bowl games that comprise college football bowl season in 2024-25. That’s up from 39 at the end of the 2014-15 college football season and just 28 two decades ago. For companies attaching their brands to these postseason experiences, there’s considerable incentive to get a little weird with their sports marketing and separate themselves from the pack.
“It became more challenging to drum up excitement or get the commitment as more bowl games were created,” said Bob Lynch, founder and CEO of SponsorUnited. “It creates this glut of inventory that makes it so much harder.”
But still effective: According to television data firm EDO, all college bowl games last year were an average of 33% more effective in connecting consumers with ads than overall primetime programming. And when Kellanova’s team at Pop-Tarts dropped their edible mascot into a giant toaster on Dec. 28 in Orlando, Fla., last year, Pop-Tarts ads aired during that game cooked their primetime counterparts by more than 1,800%.
By New Year’s Day at Orlando’s Cheez-It Citrus Bowl, the Pop-Tart stunt had gained so much traction that Cheez-It mascot Ched-Z emerged from a giant on-field box toting a sign reading “NON-EDIBLE MASCOT.” As a result, the bowl’s ads outperformed primetime by 52%, with Cheez-It’s own promotions getting a 258% boost.
But brands can’t simply run the same play again during the next year’s bowls. Pop-Tarts is adding more edible mascots, while Cheez-It surrounds Ched-Z with Love Island stars and two-minute weddings.
The Arizona Bowl, which saw its ad effectiveness nearly double in primetime on Dec. 30 last year at the end of a three-year sponsorship with Barstool Sports, handed its event to Snoop Dogg for the next three years and dubbed itself the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl presented by Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop.
